WASHINGTON — When I met Harry Belafonte several years ago in Selma, Alabama — where he and other participants in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march had gathered to celebrate the event — we did not speak at length, and I don’t recall exactly what we said.
But I do remember that, when he spoke to us later that evening, he reminisced most proudly and movingly, not about his career as an entertainer, but about his work as a civil rights activist and humanitarian.
I often recall the singular role that Belafonte, who died this week at the age of 96, played in energizing the marchers and mobilizing other high-profile entertainers to join him in the event — Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Tony Curtis … and most notably his longtime friend and fellow troublemaker, the actor Sidney Poitier.
At the Selma event several years ago, Belafonte talked about how he and Poitier, who died last year, had often joined forces to make “as much mischief as we could” trying to make the world a better place.
On one occasion he and Poitier ventured to Greenwood, Mississippi, where an office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been set up in the summer of 1964, when thousands of white civil rights activists from the North had come to Mississippi to participate in a voter-registration initiative known as Freedom Summer.
That summer, the bullet-ridden bodies of three civil rights workers — Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner — had been found in an earthen dam just south of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where they had been investigating the burning of an African American church. They had been killed by local white racists, with the assistance of the local police.
Later that day, the phone rang at Belafonte’s 21-room apartment in New York City, and the man on the other end of the line, SNCC’s James Forman, said to Belafonte: “We’ve got a crisis on our hands down here. We need help.”
The discovery of the bodies of the three civil rights workers had prompted many white students from the North, who were due to return home, to seek permission to stay longer to carry on the fight. But money to support them was running short.
Forman told Belafonte that if the students were to leave Mississippi now, the Ku Klux Klan would claim that it had driven them out. He said that he needed at least $50,000 — immediately.
The newspaper columnist and broadcaster Irv Kupcinet offered to help by hosting a fundraiser, with Belafonte in attendance, at his home in Chicago. A total of $35,000 was raised. A trip by Belafonte to Montreal yielded another $20,000, and he and his wife Julie collected another $15,000 at a fundraiser at their New York apartment.
But now Belafonte had to figure out a way to get the money to Mississippi. “I couldn’t just wire it and have a Black activist go to the local Western Union office to ask for his (money), please,” Belafonte recalled in his 2011 memoir “My Song.” “He’d be dead before he drove a mile away. ... The money would have to be brought down in cash. And unless I could come up with a brighter idea, I’d have to take it down myself.”
So the 37-year-old Belafonte, failing to come up with a brighter idea, contacted Poitier, who at first was reluctant to join him on the mission. But eventually Belafonte convinced his friend to come along, joking that while “the chances of a Klansman taking a potshot at me were actually pretty high ... it’ll be harder for them to knock off two Black stars than one. Strength in numbers, man.”
Unaccompanied, the two men boarded a plane at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, for Jackson, Mississippi, toting a black doctor’s bag filled with $70,000 in small dollar bills.
At the Jackson airport, they were met by Forman and two SNCC volunteers, who took them to a private airstrip, where they were put on a small Cessna aircraft and flown by an unfriendly white pilot (“Was he a Klansman, leading us into a trap?”) some 100 miles north to Greenwood.
Two SNCC volunteers, in two cars, were waiting for them, and as they prepared to leave the driver of the car carrying Belafonte and Poitier — SNCC field secretary Willie Blue — saw a long row of headlights at the far end of the pitch-black airfield.
“That’s the Klan,” Willie Blue, one of the SNCC volunteers, told me a while back that he told Belafonte and Poitier. But instead of turning around, he and the driver of the other car drove full-speed ahead straight toward the outline of three or four pickup trucks in the distance.
Nearing the trucks, the two SNCC cars then swung quickly toward an alternate route to town, and the trucks fell in line behind them. “Why aren’t you driving faster?” Belafonte asked Blue, who was keeping strictly to the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit. “Faster, man!”
But Blue said he refused, saying that driving faster than the speed limit was precisely what the Klansmen wanted him to do. He said that a Mississippi state trooper was there waiting in his car with the headlights turned off, ready to arrest them for speeding.
Blue said that the state trooper would take them to the police station and then release them after about an hour. And even more members of the KKK would be waiting outside to do what they did to Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.
Belafonte wrote in his memoir that one of the pickup trucks kept ramming the back of the car as Blue maneuvered the vehicle toward the middle of the two-lane road to keep the pickup truck from pulling alongside. “We can’t let them pull up beside us,” Blue said. “They’ll shoot.”
After two or three terrifying minutes, a convoy of cars appeared ahead of them. “That’s them,” Blue told Belafonte and Poitier, signaling that a SNCC brigade was coming to the rescue.
As the pickup trucks slowly retreated, a dozen or so shots rang out in the night air. No one was hit, fortunately, and the SNCC brigade led the cars into Greenwood, where hundreds of volunteers had assembled at the SNCC office to greet the two entertainers.
“Screams of joy went up from the crowd,” Belafonte recalled in his memoir. “Sidney and I had heard a lot of applause in our day, but never anything like those cheers. ... To have two of the biggest Black stars in the world walk in to show solidarity with them — that meant a lot to them, and to us.”
He said that once the crowd had settled down, he held up the black satchel that he had brought with him and turned it upside down on a table, letting bundles of cash roll out to the shouts of the roomful of tired but now-inspired and overjoyed SNCC volunteers.
Belafonte said that when he returned home, he asked himself why he had taken on the civil rights movement as a personal crusade. He said that any Black American “with a pulse and a conscience” would have done the same thing if they had the means in the summer of 1964.
“We couldn’t tolerate more lynchings and beatings,” he recalled in “My Song.” “We couldn’t abide more ‘whites-only’ signs on the hotels and restaurants and gas stations and water fountains and bus stations in the segregated South. We couldn’t let Black Americans be treated as slaves in all but name anymore.”
“Yet why this little boy, among all others, should use his anger to push himself up, make a name for himself, and then make it his mission to smash racial barriers and injustice with such grim determination, I’m not sure I can say.”
“Perhaps, in the end,” Belafonte said, “where your anger comes from is less important than what you do with it.”
- Gary G. Yerkey is an author/journalist based in Washington. He has spent more than a decade in Europe reporting for TIME-LIFE, ABC News, The Christian Science Monitor and other U.S. news organizations. His books include “Troublemakers: On the March for Civil Rights from Selma to Black Power,” published in 2021.
