Vital Viewing (Sad to Say He's on His Way Edition)

 

1927-2023

Singer, actor, and political and social activist Harry Belafonte died. Here he is being interviewed by Good Morning, America's David Hartman way back in 1981:

Hartman may not have placed a heavy burden on Belafonte with that question, but he certainly placed a heavy burden on this post! I mean, now I have to explain why Harry was an international superstar. I guess the best way to do that is by giving you examples of his singing, acting, and activism. 

I'll start with the singing. Though he sang all types of songs in his long career, Belafonte was best known as a folk singer. What made him different from Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, or the Kingsmen Trio is that Belafonte often went outside the continental United States for his material. And why not? Though he was born in New York City, both his parents were Jamaican immigrants and Harry himself spent a few years as a child living with his grandmother in the ancestral homeland. And when he was there, he kept his ears pricked to the local sounds. And there's no more local a Jamaican sound than...

...CALYPSO! 

A groupie.

Now, this dude's musical repertoire normally isn't anything like Belafonte's, yet when Harry appears on his TV show, Mr. Cole humorously holds his own as one of Harry's biggest hits becomes a duet:

Unless Jellystone Park is located somewhere in the Caribbean, I don't think that's who they were singing about.

You heard the man. He's leaving this place behind...

...and is heading halfway around the world:

Really, though, one country or  one region of the world wasn't enough to hold Harry Belafonte down.  As David Hartman pointed out in the video at the top, Belafonte was an international star...

...as this muppeteer would readily attest:

Belafonte later performed the song at Jim Henson's memorial service.

All right, enough with the singer (well, I guess you could never get enough of him as a singer.) 

 

 Let me move on to the actor, which is what he wanted to be in the first place. He only started singing at clubs to pay for acting school. Yet his film appearances were sporadic, and by his own volition, as he didn't like how blacks were often depicted in movies. What the movies had in store for him could be pretty odd at times. And there's no better example of that than...

 ...this film. Oh, it's a very good movie, a very good musical, an updating of Bizet's opera Carmen to World War II. Its two principal actors Dorothy Dandridge and Belafonte had already earned a degree of celebrity as singers by 1954 when this movie came out, which didn't stop director Otto Preminger from dubbing their voices during the musical numbers. Dandridge lip synced to a then unknown Marilyn Horne, and when Harry opened his mouth, what you heard was not him, but some dude by the name of  LeVern Hutcherson. I'll admit Hutcherson did a fairly decent job of singing, but he's not the subject of this post. For that reason I'm not going to show you a clip from that film.

Instead, I'll show you a clip from...

...this film. Released 20 years after Carmen Jones, Belafonte plays mob boss Geechie Dan Beauford. Watch:

I think Marlon Brando just fell off the banana boat.

Of course in real life, Harry Belafonte was anything but a gangster, and that brings me to the political and social activist:

 

In 1960, Belafonte stumped for JFK.

Now, here's Belafonte with a man who never ran for any public office, yet brought about more change than many who have.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, it was Belafonte who paid his bail.

Belafonte, Charlton Heston (who hadn't yet gone over to the dark side), Burt Lancaster, and Sidney Poitier hanging out together during the March on Washington.

During a taping of her 1968 TV special, Petula Clark actually touched Harry Belafonte's arm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The sponsor, Plymouth Motors, asked that it be retaped. Clark refused, the controversy was reported in the press, and once the special finally aired, it got huge ratings.

Ironically, in that same year on that same network...

...this aired to considerably lower ratings. If the sponsor had only complained...

Belafonte and Coretta Scott King.

By 1985, Belafonte's chart-topping days were behind him, yet as one singer of many, he contributed vocals to a hit song, "We Are the World".

Belafonte was a longtime UNICEF ambassador.

Stumping for Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Grand Marshall in a gay pride parade.

Harry and Sidney at the NAACP Image Awards.

It goes without saying that all of the above has made some question Belafonte's patriotism.

But Harry begs to differ.

 

Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Selma, 1965

See that man in the overcoat in the lower right of the above picture? He's clearly run afoul of the law, and is now about to receive his punishment in the form of an Alabama State Trooper's billy club. Well, you know what they say, crime does not pay. Except...exactly what was his crime? Did he try to rob that Haisten's in the background, the only company I know of that specializes in both mattresses AND awnings? No, that wasn't his crime. Maybe he tried to mug that man in the middle of the picture, that big dude carrying what looks like a bag (I've blown up the picture to size of the computer screen and still can't tell you what it is.) But no, that's not his crime either. Maybe he tried to rape that kneeling woman in the lower left of the picture. Except then why isn't any of those cops helping her back up on her feet? Blow up the picture, and she looks a little afraid to get up, and it ain't the guy in the lower right of the picture nor that big dude with the bag that she's afraid of. I think we can rule out rape. Lessee, what other crimes are there? Did he rob a bank, steal a car, kick a dog, spit on the sidewalk, or remove a tag from a pillow? No, none of those things. His only crime was exercising a First Amendment right, as he and others had peaceably assembled on a bridge to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. At least it was peaceable until the cops showed up, thus greatly increasing the grievances that needed redressing.

Now, this wasn't the man in the overcoat's first run-in with the law, and maybe not even the first time he got his skull cracked. When he was still in high school he had closely followed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and made it a point to meet both Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, which he did before he had even reached the age of 20. When he was in college, he became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders, seven whites and six blacks who rode several buses from Washington D.C. to New Orleans as a way of testing a Supreme Court ruling that proclaimed segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional. At a stop in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the young man walked into  a whites-only waiting room and got kicked in the ribs by a couple of those whites. Nevertheless, he continued with that Freedom Ride and several others throughout the early 1960s, one of which got him a 40-day stay in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. All this might seem a difficult way to spend one's young adulthood, but he had now earned the respect of many of his peers, and was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In that role he became one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington, where he made a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial--at 23 he was the youngest speaker that day--and, along with a bunch of other Civil Rights leaders, got invited to the White House  (that's him in the above photo, fourth from the left, and to the immediate right of the aforementioned King.) All well and good. Then, two years later, came that Bloody Sunday in Selma, but even that didn't stop him. By the late 1970s, he had become a member of the Carter Administration. In 1981, he ran for and won a seat on the Atlanta City Council. In 1986 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving Georgia's 5th congressional district for 17 consecutive terms, right up until the day he died. Before that day arrived, however, he had lived long enough to see a black man elected President. He also lived long enough to see that black man succeeded in the same office by a racist, and witness yet another round of racial violence. Live long enough and you get to see the good and the bad, played out in what seems like an endless loop.

John Lewis 1940-2020

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In the July 20 issue of The New Yorker, the always-readable academic Jill Lepore has an article about the history of policing titled "The Long Blue Line". Y'all should check it out.

Quips and Quotations (Election Day Edition)

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

--Declaration of Independence.

 We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

--Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Convention

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
and whatever is done or said returns at last to me…
I speak the pass-word primeval--I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms…

--Walt Whitman

I believe the only way to protect my own rights is to protect the rights of others.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower

 It takes no compromise to give people their rights...it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.

--Harvey Milk

 O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME

--Langston Hughes

A republic, if you can keep it.

--Benjamin Franklin, when asked just what kind of government had come out of that Constitutional Convention. 


Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.

--Thomas Paine

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

--Eleanor Roosevelt

...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

--Abraham Lincoln

In Memoriam: Dick Gregory 1932-2017

"Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?"

"Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said: 'That's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.' About that time these three cousins came in, you know the ones I mean, Klu, Kluck and Klan, and they say: 'Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin'. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.' So I put down that knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken, and I kissed it."

Gregory was born in St. Louis (as was another black comedian ten years earlier: Redd Foxx) A very good athlete, he earned a track scholarship  to Southern Illinois University--Carbondale, where he set school records as a half-miler and miler. Unfortunately, there was another institution out there very much interested in athletic young men: the U.S. Army. I was under the impression there was such a thing as college deferments during the draft era, but for whatever reason, Gregory didn't get one, and he spent the next two years serving Uncle Sam. This was many years before the military's 1970s post-draft advertising slogan Be All You Can Be, but Gregory soon found he had another skill, one that couldn't have gotten him a scholarship as track and field had, but would bode well for him nonetheless. A commanding officer who noticed Gregory was a bit of a cut-up, encouraged him to enter an Army talent show. Gregory did and won (I don't know what, but it obviously wasn't a deferment), and then entered several more, and won those, too. When his hitch was finally up, Gregory briefly returned to SIU, but didn't stay long. He was now determined to be a comedian, and moved to a city in a neighboring state.

Chicago. Note the sign to the left, and though it's obscured partially by a streetlight, you should still be able to make out the name of a popular comedy team of the day (which reminds me, I have another obituary to do once I'm through with this one.) Gregory wouldn't be playing in the same venues as those two guys. Not yet anyway. As he himself put it: "Blacks could sing and dance in the white night clubs but weren't allowed to stand flat-footed and talk to white folks, which is what a comic does." So he played to black audiences in black clubs, but a white or two could occasionally be found in the audience, such as this fellow:

Hugh Hefner may look a bit grim in the above picture, but he was said to have laughed out loud at Gregory's Civil Rights-infused act (see jokes at top of post) and got the young comic a job working here:

Hefner's own Playboy Club. Gregory was now performing his comedy to mostly white audiences, but he didn't tone it down any. And didn't need, too. Black comics were becoming increasingly more popular with the white folks. Nipsey Russell, Godfrey Cambridge, Bill Cosby, and the aforementioned Foxx all began to be heard and laughed at during  this era. Still, nightclubs were hardly the apex of show business. For that you needed that new medium, television, and, increasingly, if you wanted to get on television for the very first time, you needed this guy:

Before Jimmy, Jay, Conan, Jay, and Johnny, there was Jack. Gregory actually turned down invitations to appear on the late night talk show at first, which puzzled Paar. It seems black comics in the past had performed their monologues but were not asked afterwards to sit down and chat with Paar, which wasn't the case with the white comics. Paar promised they would chat, Gregory appeared on the show, and soon became a household name.

 I actually can't find a photo of Gregory on Paar's show, so you'll just have to settle for Merv.

Gregory killing a white audience, in the only way he knew how.

As the 1960s wore on, Dick Gregory morphed into a political activist, and remained one right up until the end. He never out-and-out quit comedy, but nightclub owners became reluctant to book him. It's one thing to joke about civil rights, it's another to get arrested for it. Gregory, for his part, no longer wanted much to do with nightclubs anyway. Those places served booze, which he had come to see in political terms ("If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.") So he basically earned his living on the college circuit, while continuing his outside activities. In addition to fighting for social justice, Gregory became a conspiracy theorist. The Kennedy assassination, the King assassination, 9/11, and even the 1969 moon landing were all at the mercy of his skepticism.

Gregory often fasted as a means of protest, weighing only 100 pounds at one point. And he never quite put the weight all back on again.  He may not have always looked as he does in the above picture, but he sure was a pretty skinny dude these past few decades.

Though it wasn't the reason why he chose to starve himself, Gregory decided a extremely limited diet had been good for his health, and wished to share his nutritional findings with others.

You may disagree with Gregory's views, express disapproval at his choice of associates, snicker at some of his more outlandish doings, but at least respect the fact that he basically sacrificed a career as a comedy superstar, with all the earning potential that entails, to fight for the things he truly believed in. Sure, a lot of celebrities these days have their own pet political and social causes, but they make damn sure first their agents are out lining up jobs for them before they start marching. Dick Gregory? I don't think he even had an agent! (He did back in the 1960s, but I can't find anyone who might have represented him lately.) 

Through it all, Dick Gregory maintained his sense of humor, always ready to crack a joke, be it a protest rally or an appearance before Congress. I used to watch C-SPAN quite a bit back when I had cable, and Gregory appeared on it from time to time, usually before a college audience (the network covers lectures, seminars, and whatnot when Congress is not in session.) Once he was on some serious-minded panel discussing the serious-minded topic of urban poverty. The discussion turned to crime, and Gregory had this to say:

"I saw in the news that this burglar broke into a drugstore and stole all the Viagra. The police put out an all-points-bulletin, telling everyone to be on the lookout for a hardened criminal."

You can take the activist out of the Playboy Club, but you can't take the Playboy Club out of the activist.