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Harry Belafonte
thor n w i ll ow pr e s s 2013
The text of 1963 was expanded by Harry Belafonte from his recollections of the March on Washington as they appear in his memoir My Song, co-authored with Michael Shnayerson and published in October 2011. This text appears with permission from Alfred Knopf.
“
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I
have a dream… I have a dream today…” Can it be 50 years ago that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington and uttered those immortal words? The passage of time from that hot Augu day in 1963 seems infinitely long, yet I can see the day so clearly ill: crowds seeping across the National Mall, hundreds cooling their feet in the Refleing Pool, the podium and reviewing and set by the Lincoln Memorial for the speech to come. I can see Martin, too, as he looked that summer before the march: hopeful but anxious, profoundly aware of the challenges we faced. What if the White House, or the FBI, found a pretext to cancel the march? Or if they didn’t, what if no one came? A small crowd would all but deroy Martin’s clout and credibility. At this critical time, the whole civil rights movement might die. The year of 1963 had begun like any other. But artling events, and new voices, had shaken
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things up early on. In February, a powerful new book called The Feminine Myique created the cause of feminism and made its fir-time author, Betty Friedan, a cataly for change. Weeks later, the fir Beatles album to reach America, Please Please Me, shot up the charts with a whole new sound that changed pop music forever. The very pillars of American society were being knocked down. And then came the showdown that would re-ignite the civil rights movement, pushing Dr. King into a ando with President Kennedy and his brother, the U.S. Attorney General, and making the March on Washington not only possible but necessary: Birmingham. Along with Dr. King, I would be pulled into Birmingham, too, and then into planning the march. I’d made a name for myself as an entertainer around the world. To help Dr. King in the way he needed, I’d have to use that celebrity now, to a degree that no ar had before. I’d fir met Martin on a spring Sunday in 1956 at the Abyssinian Bapti Church in Harlem. I wasn’t a churchgoer by nature. Usually on Sunday mornings I was sleeping late, after a show
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at the Waldorf-Aoria in New York, or the new Riviera in Vegas, or the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. Church wasn’t my yle, but Dr. King had called to ask if I’d come. “You don’t know me, Mr. Belafonte, but my name is Martin Luther King, Jr.” I knew who King was. I knew why he was calling, too. Four months into the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott arted by Rosa Parks, Dr. King, the boycott’s spiritual leader, had come to New York in desperate search of funds to keep the boycott going. I knew that whatever King wanted from me would probably involve writing a check. That was fine. I was at the top of my game as a singer and aor, with be-selling albums and a hit Broadway show. I was making good money, and happy to write checks. The misgivings I had were of a dierent sort. No one else quite like him had appeared in my lifetime, with the exception of Gandhi. Would he live up to the hype? That he did. King’s sermon from the pulpit of that Harlem church rocked me. He might be young –two years younger, at 24, than I was–but he was fully loaded and ready.
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When I met him afterward, I was ruck by his sense of calm. He ood surrounded by at lea two hundred well-wishers, yet he seemed unaeed by the crowd, at peace with himself, as if he were anding alone. Finally he broke through the greeters and motioned me to follow him downairs. The church basement was used as a Sundayschool classroom; it had a blackboard and folding table and a dozen or so raight-backed wooden chairs. A photographer took a few piures. Then King gently ushered him out and closed the door behind him, and it was ju the two of us. I asked King why he’d gotten involved in the fir place. In his soft, fervent voice, he began to talk about the poor, and his deep commitment to alleviating their plight. But he didn’t ju talk–he liened, too. Our conversation was so intense that I had no idea, when he ood up, that three hours had passed. All I knew was that here was the real deal, a leader both inspired and daunted by the burden he’d taken on. “I’m called upon to do things I cannot do,” he said, “and yet I cannot dismiss the calling. So how do I do this?”
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I said I’d help him any way I could. And for the next twelve years I did.
we knew that 1963 would be a turning point for civil rights, one way or the other. The movement had faltered; the nation had tired of seeing Dr. King lead one prote after another. Yet no new laws had been passed to eradicate segregation in any of its hateful forms. For the movement, it was now or never. We had to rike at the very heart of Jim Crow, to march through a Southern city so filled with hate that its law enforcers would show the world how raci they were. That city was Birmingham, Alabama. The images that emerged from those April marches horrified the world. Policemen unleashing violent dogs again teenage marchers… thousands of school-aged children set upon by mounted police… children flung up reets by water cannons and herded en masse into makeshift jails. Dr. King’s own incarceration inspired his remarkable “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” It also led me to call the top labor unions to raise money to bail him out.
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More money–six-figure money–was needed to bail out the hundreds of children, 75 to each cell built for eight. I hadn’t expeed any help from the White House: both President Kennedy and his brother Bobby were furious we’d aged Birmingham in the fir place. Bobby in particular had seemed a cold and implacable opponent to our cause – or at lea to our taking that cause to the reets. “You have to find his moral center,” Martin had told me more than once. Now, to our surprise, Bobby showed us that moral center. Taking a huge political risk, he made secret calls himself to union leaders. The bail money he got from those union leaders set those children free. Without Bobby, the children might have ayed in jail a crucial few days more. Violence might have erupted as angry parents filled the reets. Bobby deserved enormous credit, and I sensed, when I told him so, that he took quiet pride in having done not ju what needed to be done, but what was the right thing, too.
whenever he came to New York, Martin stayed at my We End Avenue apartment with
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me and Julie, my wife. There, at the end of a day of meetings, Martin would put his feet up in our living room, and Julie would bring out his bottle of Harvey’s Briol Cream. Martin was such a moderate drinker that a bottle would la him a dozen visits. Whenever he came back, he would make a big deal of checking to see if anyone had drunk any since his la visit: he marked the level ju to be sure. Relaxed with us in his home away from home, Martin would open up, and the two of us would laugh late into the night; as somber as he seemed in public, Martin had a wonderful sense of humor, and his great, booming laugh was a joy to hear. There, too, we began planning the march. This wasn’t a new idea. It wasn’t even our idea. Back in 1941, one of my childhood heroes had called for a fir march on Washington to force President Roosevelt into aion on civil rights. A. Philip Randolph was the head of the sleeping-car porters union, which had battled the Pullman company for better pay and hours–and won. As a child in Harlem, I’d loved watching him lead his troops on parade, with their red collars and
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shiny buttons and red caps tilted ju so. Everyone admired the porters, not ju for the handsome salaries Randolph had negotiated for them, but because they were worldly–they traveled far and wide –and because mo had college degrees. So powerful was Randolph that President Roosevelt had invited him for dinner at the White House to discuss civil rights. “Don’t hold back,” the president had said. So Randolph talked and talked, taking the president to task for not using his bully pulpit. Over cigars and brandy, the president finally held up his hand. “I’ve heard everything you have to say, Mr. Randolph, and I don’t disagree. I do have the bully pulpit. But I have to ask you for one big favor that will ensure I get on with this job expeditiously.” “What? ” asked Randolph. “Go out and make me do it.” It was a profound point: even the president couldn’t take sweeping aions without the push and pull of his eleorate. Randolph had taken Roosevelt at his word, and organized a huge march. Shortly before its scheduled date, the president had made some mode concessions;
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Randolph, in exchange, had canceled his march. He’d regretted that ever since. An elder atesman now but no less impassioned, Randolph was pushing us hard to have that march at la–and not be bought o by any pledges or concessions the Kennedy White House might make in the meantime. The Kennedys, as always, were playing a careful game. They kept a pipeline open to us, but we knew they were taking a very dierent line with the Southern Democrats they needed to prote their power base. Publicly, they said very little. But we did know they were liening to what we said, if only to head o another Birmingham. One day that May, I got a call from James Baldwin, who’d ju published “The Fire Next Time,” his searing essays on race relations in America. Baldwin had been invited to Hickory Hill, Bobby’s home in Washington, to discuss what might be done to improve racial relations in the wake of Birmingham. Bobby asked Baldwin if he’d gather a group to meet at the Kennedy family’s New York apartment on Central Park South. Baldwin was calling to ask if I’d come. When, I asked?
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