HARRY BELAFONTE

Harry Belafonte has been known for over sixty years as a theatrical performer and movie star, but his first calling has always been the fight for civil rights and freedom for oppressed people in the United States and around the world. He was born in Harlem, spent his early years in Jamaica, was the first African American singer to sell a million copies of a record album, and walked with Martin Luther King in the March on Washington in 1963. Mentored by Eleanor Roosevelt, he has worked on civil rights, nuclear disarmament, the anti–apartheid movement, AIDS, cancer, Haiti, and more. He was an honorary chair of the Women’s March in 2017, and he remains active in the struggle.

Mr. B. has served on the board of RFK Human Rights for decades. He is a constant source of inspiration, a moral voice urging us to press forward ever harder. In 2017, he won the RFK Ripple of Hope Award. We met in my dining room along with Harry’s mighty and generous wife, Pamela. Candid, outspoken, controversial, Mr. B. stands strong so others may rise.

Harry Belafonte: I’m ninety now, and I feel the biological process, which is very disturbing when you first encounter it. Then you realize there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it: it’s the process of nature. So I make an accommodation: if it aches over here, I’ll wait for it to go over there.

During my very long life, a lot of people have asked me, “What motivates you? What made you become an activist?” The answer is very simple. It’s called poverty. I had to get out of it. I was born in Harlem. I saw poverty strangle the people in my community.

My mother was an undereducated immigrant woman. I admired her courage. I admired her dignity. I admired her feistiness. She was a domestic worker; she used to go out for day work. She’d stand in line in certain locations in Harlem and downtown, where employers would come and go down the line and pick who they’d give work to for that day. She came home on this particular day, and she was despondent. She took her hat off, stuck a pin in it, sat on the bed—we lived in one room—and she just looked at the wall for the longest time and said nothing. I said, “What’s the matter, Mom?” She said, “Harry”—she had this wonderful accent—“Harry, I want you to promise me something: that as you go through life, you will never see an injustice you don’t stop and try to fix.”

I didn’t quite understand what that meant—I realized it was huge—but as time unfolded her counsel stayed in my mind. No matter what I did, no matter how much good fortune came my way, there was never a day when I saw injustice and didn’t try to fix it. That gave me my place in the world. There’s always injustice, and I was never intimidated. What happened in my life, the position I was in, offered me power I could use.

Kerry Kennedy: There were other people who had power they didn’t use.

HB: That’s probably because they weren’t driven by the conditions of poverty. People act based on what they experience on their journey. My family came from the Caribbean, and there’s a distinct difference between Africans of Caribbean descent and Africans who are entirely formed by the American experience. Although I was born in New York, my mother took me back when I was a year and a half old to grow up with my grandmother. My grandmother was from Scotland; she was as white as you can get, and she came from just outside Glasgow. She came to Jamaica, met her love, and married. She was a woman of enormous generosity; she cared for the community, she cared for everybody. In the Caribbean, race didn’t have the same dynamic it has in America. Although we were under British rule and there were certain rules, Jamaica didn’t have the severe racial laws you would face in America. Out of the independence and respect I experienced in the first twelve years of my life under my grandmother’s protection, I developed enough personal esteem that when I came back to America and there were all these racial rules and attitudes, I rejected them. I had lived in an interracial community in Jamaica. Nobody was at anyone else’s throat. As a matter of fact, the black population of America is unlike the black population of almost anywhere else in the world. We are the only country that never went through an armed rebellion, except the Civil War. But black people in America didn’t rebel against the racial rules of the state. In Haiti they did. In Brazil they did. In Jamaica they did. In Africa they did.

When I came back to America, I brought this sense of independence, which got activated here when I faced “You can’t go here,” and “You can’t do this.” There was no reason for those injunctions except race, and if race was the reason, then it was unacceptable. I was ready to challenge the system, because if you didn’t challenge the system you would have to exist in the status quo, and that wasn’t acceptable to a person raised as I had been.

I dropped out of school in the ninth grade. I had dyslexia, I had medical disorders, I had a lot of environmental pressures. My father was an alcoholic and very violent. My mother’s resistance to that and her capacity to endure him kept bombarding me, because in her efforts to survive, I learned how to survive.

I volunteered for the navy and served in the Second World War. That did a lot to shape what I was learning about the universe. The biggest debate we had was over why black people were in the war. We resolved that question by concluding that what black people suffered from all the inequalities we faced in America was not as severe as what Hitler had in store for the entire world. We found a reason for self-survival, for loyalty, for patriotism: to fight against the worse evil. Many brave black men and women who made that commitment to our nation died on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. When I got out, I didn’t know where to go or what to do. Back home I had to confront the fact that, although we had a lot to celebrate in our victory abroad, there was a lot we couldn’t celebrate in America: we didn’t have the right to vote, we didn’t have the right to do a lot of things. I had a choice, to blend in with the status quo or to rebel against it—not in pursuit of power but of justice.

The one good thing about segregation for a kid bouncing around Harlem was that in our midst lived our most prophetic leaders: W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and others. I was really poor, and these icons lived two blocks away. They had to live in Harlem too, so we saw them every day; we heard their voices every day.

I had a job as a janitor’s assistant, and one day I did repairs in a building and got as a tip two tickets to the theater. I’d never been to the theater, and I didn’t know what the theater was about. What I really wanted was five dollars, but out of curiosity I went. The lights went down, the curtain opened, and when I saw black bodies on a stage articulating poetry written by black writers, and I saw the director was black, I was seeing blackness at work in a productive, joyous, instructive way. I said, that’s the environment I want to be in. I had the option of that or street gangs, and I opted to go into the theater.

I found relationships there inspiring. One day we did a play by an Irish playwright by the name of Seán O’Casey, whom I subsequently came to meet. The play was called Juno and the Paycock; it was about the Irish rebellion against British conquest and occupation. The play spoke admiringly of the courage of the Irish against the British. I became enamored of Ireland and the history of what the rebels did. After that play, Paul Robeson came to visit us. We were a small group—Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and others—and Robeson said to us that a work of art is a noble pursuit because artists are the gatekeepers of truth. Wow. Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s moral compass. Without us history knows not where it goes. We document it; we articulate it; we stimulate it. That moved me; some understanding of that idea was already stirring in me. I got very much involved in theater, and then Robeson introduced me to many of the black elite of that time: the poet Langston Hughes; A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader; Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, who was probably our greatest intellectual. I turned toward the Left because there was no relief for our political situation from any other direction.

The Left gave me a framework within which to express my artistic work, because there was so much progressive thinking in the arts at that time. All the great writers were on the left, Steinbeck and other novelists, and playwrights whose plays I did and whom I got to meet. This was my education, in the arts and in political philosophy. It was lot to learn, and I decided at that point that I needed to go to school. There was a place called the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and because I had hardly any formal education, I had to con them into letting me in. It was incredible there, because there was Bea Arthur, this talented young actress; and Marlon Brando, who became one of my closest friends; and Tony Curtis; and others. I looked around the room and I knew one thing for sure: none of us was going to make it.

I was able to pursue these studies because I was getting support on the GI Bill, since I was a veteran, but when the subsidy ended I was broke. I was just a broke black kid hoping to make a living in the theater. My mother was despondent; she wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or some other profession that made sense, and I wanted to be in the theater. I couldn’t explain it, but I had to do it. It was by some accident and good fortune that I began to have success as a singer, but I was still a pure rebel: Here’s what I like, here’s what I will do. The people in that environment seemed to be so filled with imagination; the plays I read seemed to say all the things I wanted to hear. I saw the opportunity to meet and get to know people who seemed to have a mission, which was to resist injustice. It’s as simple as that.

At that point I had met Eleanor Roosevelt, and she had taken an interest in me. I admired her greatly. When she was working at the United Nations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights she always brought in young Africans, Asians, and Latinos as guests of the American delegation to the UN, and I met a lot of these people before they became heads of state. When I was in Kenya I met Jomo Kenyatta and other Africans who ultimately became heads of state. I loved that experience.

I also met people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and soon my repertoire included all the progressive artists of the folk era. I became one of the instruments of the Left; I had a platform for my cause; now I was a rebel with a cause and a constituency, and I was beginning to understand the power of that and how I could use that power. I was a popular artist with fans in Africa and around the world; people heard my songs and my words; and I gained a global constituency of young rebels from everywhere.

I wasn’t an entertainer who was also an activist; I was an activist who was also an entertainer. I was always taking the positions I took without fear, and I was making a career for myself too.

One day I’m sitting at home and I get a call from a guy who was an activist with the Democratic Party. He said, “I’ve been asked to call you because a young man is running for president who some of us are going to endorse, and we would like to get you involved.” At that point I knew Eleanor Roosevelt, but I wasn’t engaged in electoral politics in America and didn’t know many people who were, so I was surprised when this guy said, “I’d like you to meet John Kennedy.” I asked him why John Kennedy wanted to meet me. What had happened was that one of the most visible black people in the world was a young man named Jackie Robinson, an incredible ballplayer who had a spine and stood up. The activist said that Jackie Robinson had bolted from the Democratic ranks and the party was stunned by this; apparently there had been some slight that Jackie deeply resented. He had said, “I’ll never deal with Democrats again—they’re racists too.” Now the Democrats, seeking to fill a gap, were looking at an array of black personalities, and because I was just on the rise then as a singer, the Democratic Party had said: Let’s get him to fill this space and give us a balance before we lose the black vote.

John Kennedy called me, and we met, and he wanted to know if I would endorse him. I said once I get to know more about the platform and what he was doing I would give him an answer. After my second meeting with John, I campaigned for him and went with him to Harlem and to a lot of other places. In fact we did a film together. We met again in an apartment in Harlem, and he started to ask me questions and I listened to him, and I asked him what he thought about lynching and what he thought about other issues, and he was very articulate. They used that film in the campaign. They showed it in the South, but the Democrats in the South went crazy when they showed the scene of me talking with John. It had great appeal to the black community, but the white community was not about to accept a black man and a white man chatting in an apartment in Harlem. It was a challenge to the laws of segregation.

I went to the inauguration, I sang, I became involved with the Peace Corps. It was your uncle Sargent Shriver, and a small group that became the founding body of the Peace Corps. It sort of took over my life, and that’s when I met your father.

As I was working with people from all over the globe, I found that the one thing that energized everyone was the sense of universal opportunity that was associated with the Kennedys. Everywhere I went there seemed to be these high expectations of what the Kennedys could achieve. In the campaign for John, the South had required tricky manipulations. Everything he said in favor of civil rights elicited a great cry of resistance from powerful segregationist southern Democrats. Anyone who spoke out against segregation was called a Communist: Martin Luther King was a Communist, everything we did for the cause was Communist inspired, Communist agitation. Eleanor Roosevelt, a Communist? I looked at all the lists of enemies of the state, and I wondered, If these are the enemies of the state, then who are the protectors of the state?

I was a bit of a problem because I was not a Communist and I didn’t believe in communism, but I had relationships with people who had been identified as Communists, whether it was as party members or as supporters of the Communist ideology. The Democrats didn’t know how to classify me, and I said, “Why don’t you just look at what I do and not be too concerned about what people say about my beliefs. Nobody really knows exactly what they are.” That includes me, incidentally. I survived McCarthyism because Dr. King gave us a platform to articulate in movement terms what we believed about society and politics.

One of the few people who listened with an open mind to the ideas we expressed that were associated with the Left was your father. So did Sargent Shriver, who was heading the Peace Corps. I was going to a lot of universities to recruit students to join the Peace Corps. I found that often I was caught between what I felt I knew about the Kennedy administration and what a lot of people on the left felt about what was not being achieved by John Kennedy. People who are hungry for freedom do not always embrace those who treat them as a constituency they can manipulate for their own interests. We had had an especially tough time during McCarthyism. We had to defend ourselves constantly against that enemy, and it wasn’t over. There was suspicion, and there were the tactics from the right of accusing the civil rights movement of being Communist inspired and controlled. The wounds from that period were by no means healed at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. A lot of us viewed Robert Kennedy at that time in light of his being a servant of McCarthy’s committee, which was so damaging to so many friends and colleagues. He had also been part of the committee that investigated the Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa, which a lot of people on the left saw as an antilabor crusade. He had been very tough in Jack Kennedy’s campaign. So there was an enormous amount of skepticism when he became Attorney General. That was the context in which Martin Luther King told me to find Robert Kennedy’s moral center and win him to our cause.

KK: I understand that was the way you were looking at it. What I think is that your perception of my father at that time was misplaced.

HB: The perception that he was right wing.

KK: The misperception of my father that he was right wing and dogmatically anti-Communist and insensitive to liberation movements. In fact, he was always on the side of the underdog—in part because he was the seventh child. He hated communism because he thought it was repressive, and he hated Roy Cohn because he thought Cohn was repressive. He went after Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa because he was pro-union and they were stealing from the rank and file. I know there was a lot of misunderstanding about my father back then, and some of it persists today. It’s true that he wasn’t particularly involved in the civil rights movement at the start, but he wasn’t some Steve Bannon. He didn’t come to civil rights without some sensitivity.

The great thing about my grandfather was that he encouraged his kids to travel around the world and meet with leaders and find out what was going on. That’s the reason why in 1956, when Africa’s sons were on the march to throw off colonialism, the only United States senator who stood with Algeria against the French was John F. Kennedy. He believed our greatest strength as a country was going to be in having allies who were democrats, even if they weren’t pro-American.

Most people mistakenly associate McCarthy with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the investigations and harassment of people in Hollywood, labor unions, university professors, the Rosenbergs’ trial, blacklisting teachers, and the “red scare.” But McCarthy had nothing to do with that—I imagine he supported it, but he had no role in any of it. Actually McCarthy’s committee—the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—was a Senate subcommittee with a narrow focus on rooting out Communists who worked for the US government.

Kennedy was on the committee for four months and stepped down because of the excesses of McCarthyism. Eighteen months later, Kennedy joined the Senate subcommittee as chief council to the minority on the Democratic side. There, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Kennedy exposed the fact that Roy Cohn was so zealous for blood and so incompetent with facts that Cohn accused Annie Lee Moss, an unfortunate black teletype operator, of being a Communist, based on her association with Robert Hall. It quickly became apparent through my father’s intervention that Cohn’s Hall was white, while Moss’s Hall was black.

Shortly afterward, Cohn stepped down from the committee in disgrace, and later took up a lucrative position as the lawyer for Fred Trump and mentor to his son, Donald Trump.

Martin Luther King was right to ask you to find his moral center, but it wasn’t very difficult to find; you didn’t need a pick and shovel.

HB: It wasn’t until the last years of your father’s life that he began to articulate his view of global humanity. His speeches from that period are some of the best ever given in the history of this country. But that side of him—those admirable principles and values—was not evident in his early life, when he was discovering himself, discovering his power, and in contact with McCarthyism. The latter was a huge problem for us. McCarthy was ruthless to the black community. As a matter of fact, not enough has been said about the impact McCarthy had on black life. A lot of people lost work and lost opportunity. Some suicides took place. It was a desperate period.

KK: Exactly, and I think the popular public understanding of my father has been short of the truth. When he became attorney general, he didn’t have strong connections to the leadership in the black community. As attorney general, he started building those relationships with civil rights activists, but even then all his activities were not known very widely, or at all, by some African Americans who were famous but not fully engaged in the movement. That’s what led to the confrontation that was reported at my grandparents’ apartment in New York in 1963, which you witnessed.

By the time that happened, he had sent troops into Mississippi and arranged the release of Martin Luther King from the Birmingham jail. He had sent troops to Montgomery and helped save the lives of the Freedom Riders. He had established the Prince Edward County Free School in Virginia so black kids would be educated after the county fathers closed down all the public schools to avoid forced desegregation.

So he had done a lot to demonstrate a commitment by the US government to the cause of civil rights, and while the horrific oppression certainly deserved far more activism, the extent of what he had done might not have been well known to some of the people who were at the meeting in New York. He asked James Baldwin to call the meeting so he could gain a more nuanced understanding of the issues.

HB: I think that’s true. The record you talk about was not the most significant determinant of the attitude toward your father many black people had. The meeting in New York, however, wasn’t an especially good example of anything, when you look at who was there and what actually happened. From the start, I never thought that meeting was a good idea.

When I learned from James Baldwin that he was putting together a group of people to meet with Bobby Kennedy in New York, I didn’t like the idea at all. Baldwin was not a politically sophisticated person, and the people he was inviting—people like Lena Horne and Lorraine Hansberry, and other celebrity types who weren’t deeply committed to activism or Dr. King—were not representative of black leadership or, and this is important, what other people had been doing in and for the movement. It wasn’t going to help Bobby to talk to these people; they had nothing to offer him about what the movement wanted or what it was doing. Anyway, the meeting happened. In the meeting, everyone was very polite, but after maybe an hour or so, a young man by the name of Jerome Smith, who was a CORE volunteer who had been on the Freedom Rides and was severely beaten, jumped into a discussion about Vietnam. He said, “I don’t want any more of this polite shit. What am I here for? You’re talking about Vietnam and we’re gonna be lying if we say we’re gonna be going off to Vietnam.” The popular phrase at the time was, “Why should we kill people in Asia, when we don’t have any rights here in America?” Bobby was trying not so much to defend what the government was doing in Vietnam as to explain it, and he was getting very upset, because all of a sudden, the whole meeting had become fractured. People zeroed in on the real meaning of a gathering about the civil rights movement, and in that conversation, Bobby said, “Well, you don’t understand what we’re doing.” The response to that was: “We understand what you’re doing; what you don’t understand is what you’re not doing. The world is most appreciative of some of the things that you do, but there are much more basic things you haven’t touched on at all.” Bobby got more and more upset, and he was particularly upset because he didn’t feel that those of us who knew him were defending him from the attacks that others there were making on him. Nothing positive was accomplished. Much to my surprise, the very next day, the New York Times had a story about the disruption that had taken place between Bobby Kennedy and the others, and all of a sudden we had to deal with a public interpretation of what had gone on, and that’s when Bobby went through his most severe moment of feeling that we were not defending what he knew would be the Kennedy legacy. We said we didn’t care too much about a legacy; that wasn’t our concern as members of the black community. We said we didn’t know how to defend him against the white community, the Ku Klux Klan, and everybody else who wanted to destroy his life politically, because we had a fight with those same elements at an entirely different level. It wasn’t just about who the president was or even about what any individual might do with that power when he got it.

Your dad and I began to talk more regularly after that and share our points of view. He came to understand that there wasn’t a carte blanche patriotism we could be expected to express regardless of what effect domestic events were having on the black community. We needed much more than we were getting in terms of both recognition and actions. This was especially true in a context where Dr. King was being labeled a Communist by those who opposed civil rights. Over the years I did come to know the deeper character of your father. I felt completely comfortable with him when he was campaigning around the country in 1968, and then he was taken from us.

We have the luxury of hindsight, so let’s take advantage of it. One would imagine that with the Civil War and the emancipation of the black population from chains, we would somehow by now have established an understanding that we must all strive to safeguard the institutions designed to ensure that racial oppression should never rise again. We fought slavery and replaced it with Jim Crow; now we confront resegregation, racially drawn election districts, laws designed to keep black people away from the polls, police violence against black communities—a new generation of discrimination, segregation, and hatred.

I have never been as sought after as I am at this moment. I’m no longer in the theater or movies, I don’t have any new records, yet I just came from the University of Oklahoma in the heart of a red state, and three thousand students—this is not an exaggeration—came to see me. Maybe 30 or 40 percent were black and Hispanic. The rest of the crowd was white. Why did they all come out? They’re not going to hear a great version of “Banana Boat,” so what were they expecting? What I discovered is that there is a deep, deep need for the nation to articulate more than it has revealed.

I’m amazed that it’s been fifty years since Martin’s assassination, fifty years since your father’s death. No one in the constituency I talked to so passionately came to Oklahoma. We’ll be in Arizona on Wednesday. Then Seattle. Nobody talks about the civil rights now. As a matter of fact, some of them say they don’t quite remember what that was.

All these people who came to Oklahoma were filled with goodwill; they wanted to know; they wanted to be involved; they wanted to hear. They realized that somewhere, somehow, something had been lost. What we had achieved in the civil rights movement, up to and including today, has been lost over the past fifty years. It’s not in the curriculum; it’s not in school; it’s not on the pulpits; it’s not on the radio stations. They report it every now and then when there’s an incident, but there’s no ongoing tradition that articulates what that period in our history achieved, so every time a new generation arrives, we have to go through the whole thing all over again. I have to tell you, I’m really goddamn bored going back to Revolution 101.

There’s no machine that carries our history forward, because we don’t own the tools of propaganda. We don’t control the media. We’re now just trying to find—not just the black community, but everybody is trying to find—an honorable educational system that will begin to be far more inclusive than what we have now. Nothing works when there’s no activism; it can’t always require an emergency; there has to be ongoing dialogue and action. I said to an audience, “When last at your dinner table have you ever mentioned in the course of conversation the name Nelson Mandela?” There’s a silence. “Where’s your sense of responsibility for letting the next generations know about our history?” While we’re looking for the enemy, you must look to that part of the enemy that’s within us. White folks listen because you’re in their face, but you’re not in their face any longer. You’re in their face for another job title; you’re in their face for some person who wants to be the next congressperson, who does not necessarily come with the platform that’s all the goodness of humanity. A lot of these guys that are running for office are not deeply devoted to ending poverty. As a black elected official, that’s what their mission should be: to change the economic paradigm and to find new dynamics.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about the church. I am staunchly opposed to the way in which religion has affected the black community. All you ministers, when last on Sunday have you talked about the plight of black youth? Why aren’t you doing more about the prison system? Why aren’t you devoting at least ten minutes of your sermon every Sunday on the issues of criminal justice? What can we do to change that, or do you just continue to talk about our hero Jesus, and that’s it? You guys are guilty of failure to teach. And let’s understand: I believe in God. That’s not because of anything the church told me! I believe in Him because He is my moral guide through this morass of human difficulty. But the church is as responsible for what we don’t do as for what we do. I say to the ministers: Why aren’t you raising your voices? Why aren’t you using your sermons and speeches to educate the young people today? They know nothing! They know some of the historic imagery, but they don’t know the context. They have no analysis of what happened and what it meant. Without that they can’t possibly have a powerful, active vision for the future.

KK: It’s a disservice to the students and to our country. I’ve had this experience, to go into a middle school on Martin Luther King Day and on the walls there are the cut-out colored construction paper letters that spell out “I Have a Dream,” and the kids have put up their contributions: “I have a dream… of having a pony.” The context is truly missing.

HB: The context is missing. So why do three thousand people come to hear me in Oklahoma, black and white and Hispanic people? Why is there such a great interest in hearing me speak? If we take away the show business part of it, there’s no answer—it doesn’t make sense—but I think I’ve figured it out. There’s a need to know the history, the struggle, the legacy, and just by virtue of being ninety—it’s not a virtue, actually—I’m one of the last authentic parts of a movement that once took place that kids do not know about. They don’t know the price we paid for what they have. Most black people don’t vote.

People were murdered in the name of getting that right. We have to be vigilant today to make sure the Supreme Court or the president or the Congress doesn’t take away what we’ve gained. The engine of change we created needs fuel. We need to be part of an ongoing legacy of which people are informed, so that we can produce leaders who use the knowledge that comes from knowing history. I’m trying to do as much as I can to fill that void, because you know, ninety years of life teaches you something. You don’t have another ninety.