Harry Belafonte: The Secret Soldier

It is well known that Harry Belafonte was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, a member of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle, and close to the students who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); he was a prolific fund raiser, not just through his own concerts and appearances, but by roping in fellow artists from the USA and overseas . It is less well known that he was, through his “Rat Pack” contacts, friendly with the Kennedy brothers, especially Robert, and acted as a conduit between Dr King and the administration. What is not known at all, however, are his political views at the time. He wrote no articles, gave few speeches and kept his positions on the issues of the time to himself. Recently, he has been more outspoken, speaking out against the Bush administration, especially its handling of Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. He has even supported Hugo Chavez, the left-leaning President, while on a visit to Venezuela. As he turned 80 this year, and is expected to have mellowed with age , we can deduce that he held radical political views in the 1950’s and later, but was very careful to keep them secret. A close look at his history, his associates and his actions during the 1950’s and 60’s shows that not only was he a secret radical, but he had very good reasons to be circumspect about his ideological views during the McCarthy era.

Beginnings

Harry Belafonte was born in 1927 to Caribbean immigrants in New York, but spent his formative years, ages eight through thirteen, in his mother’s native Jamaica, living in Kingston as well as in the countryside near the Blue Mountains. Growing up in a black-majority country gave him a sense of self that wasn’t possible in a racially segregated USA . In 1944, Belafonte dropped out of school to enlist in the Navy and started his political education at the hands of dock-workers and fellow-seamen. He read W. E. B. Du Bois ’s Color and Democracy, opening him to radical thoughts at a time when the Soviet Union was an ally against fascism. After leaving the Navy, Belafonte saw his destiny on the stage and performed at the American Negro Theatre. Paul Robeson was in the audience one night, and that sparked a long friendship that would change Belafonte’s life in many ways.

In 1948 the fifty-year old Robeson was at the pinnacle of his career, having “made a name for himself as an American football player, as a fine singer of Opera and slave spirituals, as a capable actor (notably in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones) and finally, as a bold speaker for the cause that he championed with a passion, the fight for social justice” . His outspoken radical views had set him on a collision course with the US government, just as the Cold War was setting in. Belafonte watched as his mentor was harassed by the FBI and even had his passport revoked in 1951 by the State Department. Unable to perform in the US after his performance at Peekskill in New York was disrupted by demonstrators, and not allowed to travel abroad for performances, Robeson was entangled in a legal fight to get his passport back while his career languished. The price he paid for his radical passion was very dear indeed; Belafonte saw this and never forgot. In 2000, Belafonte “was a featured speaker at a rally in Cuba, honoring the American Soviet spies, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Tears, one observer reported, ‘streaked down’ Belafonte's face, ‘as he recalled the pain and humiliation his friend [Paul] Robeson had been forced to endure’ in 1950s America” .

Quiet Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement

During the early 1950’s, Belafonte was quietly involved in protests; he walked a picket line in November 1950 when W.E.B. Du Bois was arrested . As he recently stated: ”I came back [from the Second World War], like millions of us did, with an expectation that those principles for which we fought would be fully revealed and embraced by the American government and the American people -- the war was about democracy, the war was about ending white supremacy, the war was about ending colonialism -- only to discover that the Allies, the British, the French, the Dutch and the Americans, all who were at the forefront of the democratic charge, having victoriously won that war, did not upon the celebration of victory do anything but go back to business as usual” .

Belafonte was also a friend of Stanley Levison, who “had served in effect as a financial pillar of the (US)CP [United States Communist Party] during the height of its persecution” , and was a close confidant of Dr King for many years until J. Edgar Hoover maneuvered the Kennedy brothers into getting Dr King to break off all contact with Levison . After the lynching of Emmet Till, a fourteen year-old Chicago youth visiting Mississippi in the summer of 1955, Levison and Bayard Rustin organized ‘In Friendship’, a concert featuring Belafonte along with Coretta Scott King, a trained singer as well as Dr. King’s wife, and Duke Ellington, to raise funds to support the movement against lynching.

Belafonte chose to live in New York, rejecting the shallow show business life in Los Angeles, preferring to follow his “benign idiosyncratic politics” to where his friends in the unions and radical politics were. But aware of the intense scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and potential surveillance by the FBI , Belafonte stayed in the background.
During the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which started in December 1955, Dr. King asked for a meeting with Belafonte at Adam Clayton Powell’s church in Harlem. “Belafonte was wary of preachers and established Negro leaders, partly because he thought they had never supported his idols W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson…King said that he had heard that Belafonte cared deeply about the race struggle, quite apart from his career in show business” . Almost the same age, they soon struck up a close friendship that lasted till Dr. King’s death in 1968. Belafonte not only raised money for the movement, but advised Dr. King on finances, and taxes, and arranged life insurance to benefit Dr. King’s family in case anything should happen to him.
By 1956, Belafonte was at the peak of his popularity as a singer, having sold 1.5 million copies of his album Calypso: the first artist in the world to have made a Platinum hit. He was nominated for the Spingarn Medal that year for opening the doors of several prestigious performing venues to black artists, such as Palmer House in Chicago and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In addition, he was cited for his painstaking care to make sure that he was not treated separately from his fellow blacks . He devoted increasing amounts of time to the movement by hosting strategy and planning sessions at his New York apartment and taking part in fund-raising concerts.

The Youth Movement & SNCC

Youth and young people were very important to Belafonte and he took part in the Prayer Pilgrimage at the Lincoln Memorial in May 1957, along with Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr. and Sidney Poitier, popular Afro-American artists. It was held to commemorate the third anniversary of the Brown decision, and protest against the opposition to integration in education in the southern states. He spoke at the event: :”All my life I have firmly believed that as an artist and a human being, I cannot isolate myself from the struggles of my people; that their victories are my victories and their defeats are my defeats” . In late 1959, Belafonte along with Jackie Robinson and Sidney Poitier helped sponsor Project Airlift that brought 81 students from Africa to study in the US . He joined his old friends in helping youth and students, working with Bayard Rustin in A. William Randolph’s Youth March for Integrated Schools in 1958 and 1959. In the last Youth March, Belafonte was mired in controversy as E. Frederic Morrow, the only black political appointee in the Eisenhower administration, blocked him from accompanying the four youth delegates to meet the President. Morrow writes: “It annoys me personally to see someone like Belafonte suddenly emerge as a knight in shining armor to lead Negro youth against the forces of discrimination and segregation. I just wonder where he has been all these years when his voice and his money and his prestige would have been very helpful in these areas” . It appears that Belafonte had managed to keep such a low profile that after several years of intensive support to the movement, his contribution has gone unnoticed by the White House and members of the black middle class. But Belafonte continued to focus on the youth movement.

After the spontaneous student sit-ins of February 1960, Belafonte provided an initial contribution so that SNCC could open an office and have a permanent staff in the summer of 1961. At a meeting held between14-16 July with SNCC in Washington DC, Belafonte discussed what it would take to have 100,000-200,000 students mobilized for voter registration activities. James Forman, Executive Secretary of SNCC, wrote to him in December 1963: “Since the summer of 1961 your commitment to our struggle has not faltered and you have on many occasions enthusiastically given your time, your money, and encouraged your friends to support us. We shall never forget this” .

When the SNCC leaders were almost all burnt-out and exhausted by mid-1964, especially after the failure to seat the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party instead of the segregated delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City , Belafonte arranged a tour of Africa for them. It was an eye-opening experience to visit countries where there were “Black people in charge. Black people doing for themselves”. It opened them to the pan-African ideas that would be brought to the fore by Stokely Carmichael in the future. John Lewis, Chairman of SNCC, also ran into Malcolm X at an unscheduled stop in Kenya, leading to some collaboration in 1965 just before the former Nation of Islam leader was murdered .

Early Strategic Vision

On several occasions, Belafonte was ready to participate in direct action. In May 1961 Belafonte wanted to ride in the first Freedom Ride being organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to test the implementation of anti-segregation laws governing interstate travel through the South. But Dr. King dissuaded him, and he was not on the bus when it is firebombed outside Anniston . Belafonte, however, continued to help plan activities such as voter registration, working with Gardner Taylor, a prominent Baptist preacher, and Dr. King .

Belafonte understood that the strategic power wielded by Dr King had to be carefully preserved and kept above politics and in-fighting. During the 1960 presidential election campaign, after John Kennedy called Coretta Scott King when Dr King was arrested, and Robert Kennedy quietly worked to free him, many around Dr King, including his father, felt that Dr King should come out in support of Kennedy. But Belafonte felt that Dr King “shouldn’t play the game like a politician, at a lesser level” and his advice was heeded. Even though Belafonte himself had the ear of the future President , he wanted Dr King to remain aloof from party politics.
During that time, Belafonte seems to have had a clear policy that he would not give any speeches. When Belafonte was asked to speak at Iowa State University in February 1960, Dr King explained that he had “heard him [Belafonte] say on occasions that he limits his activities to the artistic field” when responding to the request. This was the reaction to “speak on a topic regarding man’s religious expression through music, with some emphasis on the contribution made by negro spirituals and folk music” . Belafonte was very careful to stick to his art, even though much of the proceeds from this art went to the movement.

Plain Speaking

Recently however, he has earned the ire of the establishment, especially the conservatives, by his outspoken criticism of the Iraq war that connects it to world terrorism in a way that the Administration could never imagine: ”Bush has led us into a dishonorable war that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people...What is the difference between that terrorist and other terrorists?" . In an interview with Wolf Blitzer soon after, not only does he refuse to retract what he says, but goes further: “President George Bush, I think Cheney, I think Rumsfeld, I think all of these people have lost any moral integrity… We are in this war immorally and illegally“. He seems to be carrying on the legacy of Dr King, who said in his last sermon at Ebenezer before he was assassinated: “God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless unjust war [such] as Vietnam. And we are the criminals in that war! We have committed more war crimes almost than any other nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it“ . With parallels between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam on the minds of Americans more than ever, Belafonte is doing what Dr. King might have done, if he were still alive.

Casting Bush as a terrorist echoes the words used by Belafonte’s mentor Robeson, who in 1952 “charged that the US was committed to a policy of cultural and economic genocide against black Americans (with the tactic of lynching as the basic mode of keeping the rebellious in line)”. At the Arts Presenters Member Conference, Belafonte said “We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended” . Wolf Blitzer castigated Belafonte for using this Nazi analogy, and Blitzer even had a quote from Barack Obama to show that Belafonte is isolated in his opinions . But once again this is similar to Robeson who invoked the comparison with the Nazis in his writings: “I stood in Dachau in 1945 and saw the ashes and bones of departed victims. I might have seen the ashes of some of my brothers in Groveland, Florida just the other day—or in Martinsville a few months back” .

Belafonte recently visited Venezuela with Danny Glover, the famous actor, and Cornel West, Professor of Religion at Princeton. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Hugo Chavez, he again called George Bush a terrorist and out of touch with millions of Americans: “No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we are here to tell you, not hundreds, not thousands but millions of the American people, millions, support your revolution”. Belafonte was especially irked that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when offers of help came from all over the world, including Venezuela, the Bush administration arrogantly declined all assistance, yet could not provide the help needed by the survivors of that disaster.

Moderation Leads to Success

Belafonte describes himself as an autodidact, but he has never forgotten the lessons given by his professors in the University of Life. He lives his life like “Professor” Robeson: “I am a radical. I am going to stay one until my people are free to walk the earth” . He drew his inspiration from the spirituals of the masses, but was neither a black-separatist nor anti-white, and was an internationalist in every way. Belafonte, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 1987, has traveled all over world, trying to bring freedom to children every where. He lives his life as his mentor did: “Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. …The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery” . Although he was discreet in the past, Belafonte now has no qualms about speaking out against oppression and supporting the forces of freedom.

His other “Professor”, Dr. King, has embedded a deeply pacifist viewpoint in him. Just as Dr. King, to the consternation of his hosts, asked India to unilaterally disarm during his visit to India in 1959, Belafonte says: “I don't think soldiers should be anywhere in the world. I mean, that is a moral and a basic philosophy. I think that the only way to end wars is to have no military” . He admits that it will take time to get there, but the process has to start sometime.
Both of these “professors” contributed to his working discreetly for the movement. Robeson by his example of what happened to those who publicly refused to toe the line, and Dr. King by his example of how moderation, a type of non-violence in itself, could lead to success. Instead of attacking head-on, as many urged him to, Dr. King was a master at deftly disengaging when it would pay off in the long run. On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, during the second Selma March in March 1965, Dr. King turned away, even as the state troopers parted, so that he did not risk violence, violate a Federal court order, and be responsible for a complete breakdown in the dialogue between the movement and the Administration. Belafonte learnt that it was important to preserve himself for the marathon that was the reality of the movement, rather than expend all the energy in a sprint that wouldn’t reach the finish line. By preserving his freedom to pursue his career, travel all over the world, and show the moderate side of the movement, he was also able to earn a great deal of money for the movement. Only now, when he has achieved all he needed to, and in a time when international media coverage provides far more protection than it did in the 50’s and 60’s, does he dare to bare his secret radical views. His philosophy is very aptly stated in his own words: “My social and political interests are part of my career. I cannot separate them. My songs reflect the human condition. The role of art isn't just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.”


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