Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (17 page)

Harry Belafonte

Having risen to prominence in the 1950s as the “King of Calypso,” Harry Belafonte leveraged his musical success and fame to emphasize civil rights activism. He had campaigned for JFK in 1960, performed at the inaugural gala hosted by Frank Sinatra, and become a key supporter of Rev. Martin Luther King, the 1961 Freedom Riders, and others fighting for the cause. Three months before Kennedy went to Dallas, Belafonte helped organize King’s historic March on Washington, the setting for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

I
was first really aware of John F. Kennedy during his [1952] run for the Senate in Massachusetts. He had been brought to my attention as a rising star on the Democratic horizon, and there was some question as to what he would mean to the black community up in Boston, one of two places in the North that were as extreme in their racial conflict as any Southern city. The intensity on race issues was quite severe. Based upon the racial conflict, our and Dr. King’s focus was that it was one of the cities we’d have to have on our list of places that must be attended to.

In that area, there was enough liberal power for us to call upon to stir things up a bit and get us on point. When John Kennedy stepped in, there was some question as to who he was and what he brought to the table. We were to find out later that he wasn’t all that we’d hoped he would be—things in the Senate he voted on troubled us, both on foreign policy as well as domestic issues. I didn’t really get to know him with any great specificity until he ran for the presidency. Up until that time, tracking his record in Congress, it was rather—from our perspective—undistinguished. There wasn’t anything for us to be terribly excited about. As a matter of fact, there were good reasons for us to be somewhat
cautious as to how he might vote on civil rights, human rights, and other such issues.

When he ran for the presidency in 1956, I got a call from a young man by the name of Frank Montero. He was an African American out of Connecticut or Massachusetts, if I remember correctly. But I knew Montero, and he said that Kennedy wanted to see me. I was curious. I didn’t know him. We’d not had any exchange, and why he wanted to see me was a curiosity to me. So I said, “If he’s looking for me to have some relationship to him running for the presidency, that’s off the table because I’m committed to Adlai Stevenson.” Although the primaries hadn’t fully played out and we were in a foot race, my loyalties were to the Stevenson camp. However, they were most insistent, and when I met with Kennedy he came up to my apartment in Manhattan on the Upper West Side. He had just left New Jersey, campaigning for the New Jersey primary.

Through Frank Montero, I had discovered before he arrived that one of the reasons he was very insistent on talking with me was that they had just lost Jackie Robinson as a favorite son, as somebody who’d be there for the Democratic Party, pushing the issues of the Democratic Party in relation to the black vote. But there was a conflict: Robinson was quite angry with the Democratic Party for certain racial slights.

As a matter of fact, in pressuring the Democratic Party for details on what would happen with the black community and the black vote, what they were offering to the black community—Jackie Robinson decided to break ranks and endorsed Nixon. This gravely challenged the Democratic Party and its sensibilities to the black vote. Although they were very cautious about how they treated the black vote, they were fully aware that they had to have it. By Jackie leaving, one of the great icons of the period and even now, they had to look around for who could fill that space—who could be a counterbalance to the fact that Jackie was leaving. A number of people of color
were called, and I was one of them. The Democratic Party strategist concluded that to have me in their camp would be a big plus in a response to Jackie Robinson’s break. They would push me a bit to the front of their game. When I met with John, I was quite taken by the fact that he knew so little about the black community. He knew the headlines of the day, but he really wasn’t anywhere . . . nuanced or detailed on the deep depth of black anguish, of what our struggle was really about. It kind of passed him in the night. He had some familiarity, but there wasn’t a great deal.

I asked him in detail about Dr. King. He knew very little, just that somewhere there was this force, and he was out there making some mischief. He knew for a fact that the most important element within the Democratic Party, which was the Southern Democratic oligarchy, that vote was seriously threatened by Dr. King. Therefore he had reason to keep as much distance from King as he possibly could because he needed that Southern power, the Dixiecrats.

Kennedy was not only charming but also had a bit of a wit to him. He knew some things about me as an artist and some things about my career, but I could tell he wasn’t a passionate fan. I understood that the evening we met in my home was strictly a political move and a political agenda.

In the final analysis, I told him that I wouldn’t endorse him, that I wouldn’t be in his camp until we knew more clearly and in greater detail what his platform would be in relationship to the black vote and black people in general, that I wouldn’t even consider endorsing him because I was committed to Stevenson. I remember him saying to me, just as he was about to leave, that if down the road he was able to gain the endorsement for the primaries and became the official nominee for the Democratic Party, would I then endorse him? I said, “Let’s cross that bridge when you come to it, and let’s see where the whole political landscape resides.”

I didn’t talk to him again until I began to encounter people like Harris Wofford and Bobby Kennedy and more people in the Kennedy camp
who began to move more vigorously toward the front of the game and began to dig more deeply into the black community. I had just come back from touring Europe, and the primaries had fallen his way. He had won it. Then Frank Montero again called and said, “We’d like to talk to you again.” When they came that time, they had far more details on the black vote, what the platform would look like, and I said, yes, that I would help him.

I think there’s absolutely no question that not only did history do more to make John Kennedy than John Kennedy did to make history, but that history was precisely the upheaval which this country had at its dawning. The black movement was very vigorous and beginning to move into a place that really had him imbalanced. He didn’t quite know how to deal with us. The war in Vietnam wasn’t quite the war it came to be, but it was beginning to bubble seriously during his watch. I think, between the peace movement and certainly during the civil rights movement, he was caught in a place for which he was completely ill prepared to lead. But as events grew, as things revealed themselves and he had to make decisions, there’s just no question that he always fell on the right side of the question—that as he evolved and as he grew, he became more and more caught up with us. I think more than anything else, not the politics so much but the moral persuasion, the moral force of a cause, was what made him have to take a good, hard look at who we were. But I must say that, more than anyone else in that family, Bobby was the most effective.

Bobby had a big hand in shaping how the campaign would be handled, how we would deal with a lot of issues, deal with people of color—a lot of that fell into Bobby’s space. It was Bobby who went down to Georgia and called the Georgia state legislator when Dr. King was imprisoned. John called Coretta, but it was Bobby who called the governor of Georgia and worked it out, put the game on the table.

I thought that Dr. King endorsing Kennedy was a place Dr. King didn’t want to go or shouldn’t go. We had no idea what this guy would do. We had no idea what his policy would really be, and one thing Dr. King couldn’t afford was to endorse someone who, during his presidency, turned out to be not in the best interests of black people. If he had endorsed him, a lot of that blame would be at Dr. King’s doorstep. So we mapped out a
way to do it so that it appeared as though Dr. King was endorsing him but hadn’t really, and that was an ad that we took out in the
New York Times
. The ad applauded John Kennedy for reaching in and saving Dr. King from the humiliation and the threat of being sentenced to life on the Georgia chain gang. That kind of gave the word that Dr. King was favorably inclined but hadn’t officially endorsed him. The rest of us did.

We stepped in very vigorously, and I campaigned for John and got to know him. I wasn’t as intimately engaged with him—although we had reason for meetings and exchanges—as I was with Bobby. Bobby and I had great traction and great moments together because the Justice Department and all that Bobby was about was directly in our crosshairs every day. It was extremely important to us to have America and the Justice Department on the side of the movement, because without the federal force, without the federal government, without the federal courts, without the Supreme Court, without those forces landing squarely on our side of the struggle, we had no other place else to go.

Not only did I share a feeling that the Kennedys were of our time and a huge look into the future of America, but we liked the style in which he [Kennedy] did it. He did it by identifying with an America that was far more energized with the possibilities of conquering the future. We’re going to space. We’re going to change the way in which all things are done. We’re going to have a foreign policy that looks at the world differently. All of these things coming from the Kennedy camp were very refreshing and very promising for us. So though we had some areas in which we had issues, the vast canvas of the Kennedy period was a lot of things that were in our favor.

He had style. He loved the popular culture of the day. He not only loved what Sinatra and the Rat Pack and all of those with him did, but he showed up at my concerts, invited me to the White House, and made me know that what I represented culturally he found tasteful. Bobby and Ethel came very often, especially to the concerts I gave in Washington, DC, at the Carter Barron Amphitheater. With Kennedy, with his brother, and with the family in general, especially Sarge Shriver, there was a sense that the Kennedy family was our future, was what America and what certainly white America should be about and could be about.

We had a lot invested in who they were, and we enjoyed them as a family. A lot of the stuff came out about his handsomeness and philandering—that played a very little role in our interests. We were sure there was a lot of flirtation going on. Everywhere I went, especially when there was an entertainment clan, the Hollywood group, all the most popular actresses and actors were vying for space with the Kennedys. I had a friend who once said, “Popular people used to have things thrown at them by their fan base, handkerchiefs and underclothing and all sorts of things. But the Kennedys had women throwing body parts.” That’s how insane it was in our culture about the power and the attractiveness of this family.

That same year, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was for me, like for everyone else, an epiphany. To see that much passion contained, to see that much of America on display, to see people from every strata of life caught in this magnificent moment, displaying and letting the world hear their voice in relation to the best that was in the American profile was quite breathtaking.

I had been called upon to gather the international celebrity community of artists. There were huge political sensibilities at stake and certainly Kennedy’s sense of jeopardy in his political ambition and all else that was at play, including J. Edgar Hoover, because I think he had a huge impact on this, pushed this to the edge. In the face of all of that, debating with the White House, trying to bring reason to the table, they were deeply concerned. They said there was going to be a lot of violence. Even if we thought within our own ranks they were lovely people and good of heart and there’d be no violence, we had no way of controlling external forces that might infiltrate, that had mischief on their minds. We had to assure them that we felt secure enough in the way we were doing this. We had massive labor movement players, and a lot of the security we had was heavily dependent on how well the labor movement and labor workers handled crowd control.