Joan Baez knew Harry Belafonte and Harry Belafonte knew Mississippi. Having had some unpleasant early experiences there, the man best known at that time as the Calypso King refused to play the segregated South, so he did not tour the region from 1954 to 1961.1 When he began touring there again, he was powerful enough to enforce some conditions. His shows had be open to everybody. Once he played to integrated audiences, he saw no reason why everybody shouldn’t, so he joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, efforts to integrate the South, which Baez also signed onto. In fact, since King was trying to pay for his civil rights activities out of his $8,000 per year salary, Belafonte helped finance his civil disobedience.2
Harry Belafonte put his body on the line in Mississippi during the 1961 Freedom Rides, but primarily he made it possible for many others to do so as well.
He grabbed the check for the whole operation. Then when Bob Moses organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer, Belafonte picked up that tab too. He also talked Sidney Poitier into flying down to Greenwood, Mississippi, that August, carrying $60,000 in cash to donate to the movement. For Poitier, the thought of two black men being stopped by southern cops with that much cash on them was enough to frighten him half to death. But Belafonte said jokingly, “They might think twice about killing two big niggers.” Poitier might be nervous about the prospects for survival but he was on board. The money was for SNCC, to pick up the tab for their operations that summer.3 As it turns out, Poitier was right to be concerned. The two of them flew down to Mississippi in a Piper Cub:
The Piper Cub arrived right on time. So did the Klan. Three SNCC cars waited on the tarmac in the muggy darkness. From the small plane stepped the two celebrities, Belafonte’s wide smile instantly recognizable, Poitier’s on screen serenity seeming on edge. James Forman greeted the pair, shook hands and steered them to the middle car. The convoy pulled out and drove through the airport gate. Suddenly headlights flashed in the distance. Belafonte holding the satchel stuffed with cash, noted how comforting it was to see SNCC support all around them but Forman told him the headlights belonged to the Klan.
The Klan cars chased the convoy all the way to Greenwood, frequently ramming the rear car, which served as a block so that the Klansmen could not get ahead of the convoy and cut it off. Poitier remembered the event as “a ballet, though a nerve wracking one.”4
Belafonte became the unofficial checkbook for the civil rights movement; he had also helped organize and pay for the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech and Joan Baez sang. It is safe to assume that neither the Freedom Rides nor the Voting Rights Drive could have happened as they did and when they did without the efforts and cash infusions of Harry Belafonte.
In 1961, when Baez first started touring in Mississippi, she went through what Belafonte had experienced in 1954. She was surprised that in one of the states with the heaviest black population, her audiences were solid white.
I did discover, however, that no blacks were at my concerts and would not have been allowed in if they had come. The following summer I wrote into the contract that I wouldn’t sing unless blacks were admitted into the hall. The movement was beginning to swell in ranks and spirit and I returned to the south and discovered that no blacks came to my concerts anyway because they had never heard of me. We had to call up the local NAACP for volunteers to integrate an audience for someone they’d never heard of.5
Playing another card from the Belafonte deck, she had insisted that her audiences be integrated, that anyone who bought a ticket be admitted, and that tickets be sold to anyone who asked for them. Even though southern brokers and promoters complied with her demands, her audiences were still as white as a Klansman’s dress uniform. In order to increase her recognition among minority audiences, she began booking shows in black schools and theaters. Baez determined that she should play black schools on the grounds that even if they didn’t know who she was, students would turn out for the show because it was better than school.6
When she performed a concert at Miles College, a traditionally African-American school in Birmingham, a protest of segregation was being held in the downtown area and Baez went down to participate in it. Sheriff Bull Connor, the same man who had given the Klan permission and extra time to beat up protestors and the same man who was later seen on national TV turning attack dogs loose on protestors, “was giving orders to prepare for the fire hoses, tear gas, attack dogs, and arrests.”7 Baez was furious because she could not be arrested; she had a concert she had committed to and could not fail to show up and sing. She rushed to the venue and when she stood backstage, watching the hall fill up, “I was fearing for my life.”8As they watched white people walking silently to their seats, one of the faculty members of the college said to Baez, “This is the first time whites have ever stepped foot onto this campus.”9 Baez writes about that show in her autobiography:
Perhaps it was partly because of the electricity we could feel emanating from the center of town, miles away, where the kids were at that very moment being arrested and filling paddy wagons singing and praying, scared to their bones but bolstered by each other’s presence and by the knowledge that they were doing right in the eyes of God. Images of the kids gave me courage and the concert was beautiful.10
So Joan Baez’s Mississippi summer was different from that of Ochs and the others. Most of her civil rights work centered around her support for Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom she and Bob Dylan sang at the 1963 March on Washington:
I was in Washington in 1963 when King gave his most famous speech: “I Have a Dream.” It was a mighty day, which has been described many times. I will only say that one of the medals which hangs over my own heart I awarded to myself for having been asked to sing that day. In the blistering sun, facing the original rainbow coalition, I led 350,000 people in “We Shall Overcome” and I was near my beloved Dr. King when he put aside his prepared speech and let the breath of God thunder through him, and up over my head I saw freedom and all round me I heard it ring.11
Baez not only sang at the March on Washington but worked closely throughout the early 1960s with Dr. King (whom she had met in the 1950s when she was a high school student). She marched arm in arm with him in Selma and other cities, sang at rallies in churches throughout the South to support civil rights activists, and flew down to the Deep South to walk young black children into school buildings when they were integrating white schools—doing so because she knew these little kids would be subjected to far less brutal violence from the local sheriffs and the local racist hoodlums if she was there to attract the TV cameras. (She was a very big star at that time—a far bigger star than her then-boyfriend Bob Dylan was during the early 1960s, although his fame would soon eclipse hers.) Baez, who was raised by Quaker pacifists, continued to be a major figure in civil rights and human rights struggles for decades afterward.
In 1958 Joan Baez, a seventeen-year-old kid at the time, entered Boston College as a drama major. In Boston, which was a major folk music town, she fell in with the lefty folk crowd and began performing at the Boston area clubs and coffeehouses, including the legendary Club 47 (still operating today under the name Club Passim). There she met the city’s progressives, a group of young people whose humanist politics matched hers. She was able to spend her time ignoring college and concentrating on her two favorite things: progressive politics and folk music.
Hers was a fully developed and extraordinary talent almost from the beginning and her musical reputation grew quickly. In 1959 folk singer Bob Gibson took her to the Newport Folk Festival, where she was an immediate hit. Credited with discovering her, Gibson told a reporter that discovering Baez was like discovering the wind: she was out there, bound to be noticed, and no one could take credit for a natural force like that.12 At Newport she sang duets with Gibson on the festival’s main stage and their songs were selected to appear on the sound track album. By the time the festival ended, Baez had been offered recording contracts by both Columbia and Vanguard Records, which had issued the soundtrack album. She says the difference between them was that “one [Columbia] was commercial and had mostly to do with money and the other was not so commercial and had mostly to do with music.”13 Albert Grossman, the manager of Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Gibson, and other top acts, was courting Baez at the time and wanted her to sign with Columbia. She chose Vanguard and Grossman lost interest in her except to tell her every time he ran into her that no matter how well she was doing, she could have done a lot better if she had gone with Columbia and signed with him.14
From the beginning, Baez was socially and politically committed. Because her father was Mexican, Baez had been bullied during her childhood. This treatment was at least partially responsible for her commitment to civil rights and the resolution she made early on to divide her career in halves: 50 percent show business and 50 percent activism. In 1965 she founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and refused to pay the portion of her income tax that she believed would go to pay for military spending, citing the fact that she was opposed to war as a justification and writing an open letter to the Internal Revenue Service, which read in part as follows:
I am not going to volunteer the 60% of my year’s income tax that goes to armaments. There are two reasons for my action. One is enough. It is enough to say that no man has the right to take another man’s life. Now we plan and build weapons that can take thousands of lives in a second, millions of lives in a day, billions in a week.
No one has the right to do that.
It is madness.
It is wrong.15
Her second reason was more personal and judgmental. War, Baez said, was “stupid.”16
Her commitment to civil rights deepened even more in 1961 when Baez was introduced to Bob Dylan by her brother-in-law, writer and folk-singer Richard Farina. The pair hit it off and soon became personal and musical partners. At that point, Baez’s popularity far exceeded Dylan’s, so she carried him on tour with her, greatly expanding his audience as well as expanding her own repertoire. Her covers of such Dylan songs as “Don’t Think Twice” brought him attention from a larger public. Even after they broke up, the pair remained close. In 1969 Baez recorded Any Day Now, a two-record set that consisted totally of Bob Dylan’s songs. During the 1975–1976 season she toured as a part of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review.
Politics, however, were never far beneath the surface of Baez’s interests. Even her marriage had the overtones of a political act. In 1968 she married David Harris, an anti–Vietnam War activist who was sent to prison for his activities in the protest movement. They divorced in 1973 after having one child, Gabriel.
Joan Baez and the other folk singers recognized early that the civil rights movement was about more than just speeches and proclamations. For example, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to the biggest crowd ever gathered in Washington, D.C., he was preceded at the podium by Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson, and Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as Joan Baez, who sang “Oh Freedom,” a song from slavery times that had been resurrected by the people at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, which trained future civil rights leaders. Baez sang the old refrain “Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free” and got a massive positive response.17
From the beginning, the civil rights movement relied on folk music. Today when historians and journalists look back on the days of voting rights activism they don’t choose to remember and write about the organizing, the deadly dull days of running mimeograph machines and spreading fliers all over the neighborhood. They don’t recall the endless meetings where the type of participatory democracy advocated by the Port Huron Statement insisted that everyone be allowed to speak and that all decisions be group-approved, so that meetings ran on for hours after a decision could have been made, leading to frustration and animosity and the rise of factionalism. No, they don’t recall any of the daily and decidedly unglamorous work of keeping a movement on track, focused, and moving forward.
What is remembered is the music of artists like Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Harry Belafonte, Carolyn Hester, Guy Carawan, Eric Andersen, Paul Robeson, Odetta, and the others, performing on makeshift stages, standing on truck beds and in churches and homes across the South, getting the message out in song, reminding people that no matter how divided the nation was, joining together as one was the only thing that was going to make it work, encouraging people to take their own destinies into their own hands. Historians and social critics also remember all the anonymous or formerly forgotten performers who spread the word from the rickety stages of coffeehouses throughout America.
The speeches inspired but the songs created togetherness, gave the victims of segregation comfort and tools to make changes. The music showed people they were not alone, that others had been there, too—or if they hadn’t been there, they were still able to empathize with those who were there because we are all human, so we know what suffering is. The speeches were designed to move people to action, but people can’t act without hope. The music provided the hope.
The artists who turned out for Freedom Summer were encouraging people to put their bodies and lives on the line. The men and women trying to register to vote were facing jail, loss of jobs, beatings, and death. That sort of sacrifice was not an easy thing to make; even if the activists won everything on the table, they were still going to suffer in the process of winning. The folk singers reminded people to “keep their eyes on the prize,” to stand up for what was right instead of settling for what was safe. Because of those efforts and the efforts of the armies of people demanding their rights, our world is different and better.
Joan Baez is one of the people who used her art to alter our world. Although she worked as much outside of the movement as within it, choosing her own way of serving, she served, responding positively to requests for her appearance at rallies, marches and protests, using her voice for what she saw as the greater good.