Harry Belafonte Advocates People to ‘Sing Your Song’ Through Social Activism

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Harry Belafonte Advocates People to ‘Sing Your Song’ Through Social Activism

Examiner
May 6th, 2011

Credit: WikiMedia

The movie “Sing Your Song” is more than a documentary about legendary singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte. It is also an inspiring story of how one man has made an immeasurable impact on humanitarian causes that affect people all over the world. The movie shows how, even when facing adversities that put his life in danger, Belafonte joined forces along the way with some powerful allies (including Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela and Robert “Bobby” Kennedy) committed to making the world a better place — but Belafonte still feels there is much more work to be done.

“Sing Your Song” will be televised on HBO sometime in 2011 at a date to be announced. The movie had its New York premiere on April 29 at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where it got a rapturous standing ovation. After the screening, Belafonte (who also got a standing ovation when he was on stage) did a question-and-answer session with journalist/talk-show host Tavis Smiley, with all of the questions asked by Smiley. Here is what they said during the interview.

How is it that, after all that you have seen and all you have endured, you are not bitter?

I guess I really have no time to waste. And I think bitterness takes away so much valuable energy, takes away such valuable opportunities to think things through and how to fix what’s wrong. The more we become engaged in a sense of bitterness and anger and rage …

Well, let me take that back. I think that anger … is a necessary ingredient toward engaging change. You need to feel angry about inhumanity. It helps propel you to solution.

I’ve watched bitterness, in so many places I’ve been, consume the human spirit, consume the human heart, and I always find that there is a further [better version] of us if we can just get away from bitterness — not anger, but stir it in with bitterness and get it to the point, and I think we might be able to find the solution a little quicker.

What do you say to people who see “Sing Your Song” who want to find their own moral compass?

I think every day, opportunity is evident. When you look at who’s suffering and when you look at oppression, there in that space and in that place resides many a question that is only answerable morally. And if you do not come to a center where our moral self speaks to evil, then you will be consumed by the evil that you cannot morally overcome.

Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] was not a man who resided in infallibility. He was touched by many things the devil provoked. In the final analysis, it was his moral stance, his moral commitment, the moral judgment he exercised that kept us all on course. “I am the head of the church. I am the leader in the divine power of the spirit.”

When I first took up with Dr. King, I felt compelled to let him understand, “You better know the devil you’re running with.” And he said, “Only if you promise to take a good look at the devil you’re running with,” meaning himself. All of us [in the civil-rights movement] had a sense of moral purpose, moral commitment — and that compass, I think, kept us always running and always kept us fully aware that there was always something to do.

Has everything you’ve done and gone through been worth it? Before you answer that question, can you tell the story that Martin Luther King told you about the burning house?

The story is that just before Dr. King went off to Memphis, to pick up the demonstration with the garbage workers and then went on to the poor people’s campaign in Washington, D.C. Dr. King came to us before a strategy meeting in New York. He had gone to Newark in New Jersey, because there was a great threat of violence that we thought would really derail everybody’s focus on our commitment … and would further defeat our energy and our purpose. And he thought he could head it off.

So he went into work and met with the leadership among the young in that series. And he came back from there deeply frustrated from the fact that he felt he had not gotten over to the young people. A group of us had just finished talking about the final details of the campaign, but the sense was that nothing we had done before was quite as challenging, because [we were] touching the economic nerve center of the United States of America, to touch the mountains that were held on to by the … obscene. And in that sense, Dr. King knew that now, unlike anything he had ever done, the civil rights, getting people to a conscious struggle on race and gender, that was not as challenging as touching on the economic soul of this country.

Trying to deter violence took him to Newark to the strategy meeting. He was terribly preoccupied. And I watched him throughout the entire evening try and stay focused. He was very distracted. There was something provoking him deeply …

Dr. King said to us, “You know, we struggled hard and long for the victories we have attained. Yet there’s something that troubles me deeply. For all the civil rights and all the things we’ve done … I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.” And that kind of gave us all at least a pause.

And he was a visionary … He had great intuition and clarity. The question to him was, “If that’s what you see, then what would you have us do? What are we to do with your belief that we are integrating into a burning house?” And he said, “We have no choice but to become firemen.”

And although that seemed terribly abstract, it was right on the money. He spoke in prophetic terms. He spoke biblically. “We’re just going to have to become firemen.”

Any challenge morally and in many other ways, no matter what we were going to face, this new revolution would have to be faced by the generations to come. That really, clearly manifested itself than during the [George W. Bush] administration and in part with the [Barack Obama] administration, to the extent in which we have fallen into this abyss of violence, greed and all the things that motivate the terrible part of the American experience. Martin was most prophetic in what he saw.

To the question itself, I believe that not a lot of what we did served no purpose at all if it had not served the purposes that it engaged. Everything I have done has rewarded me. I’m not saying it as some ego-serving kind of “look at me and my compassion” — none of that. I’m telling you the truth.

If I had not committed myself to the struggle against poverty, I would not have met some of the greatest forces in the universe. This [journey] led Eleanor Roosevelt to me. To know this woman and what she’d done and the way she worked on … human rights drives all thinking in the 21st century … This woman who was such a force in that called upon me to serve in the interest of black people. That’s why she called …

And Dr. King, it was in service of the cause that he called me. Paul Robeson and [Dr. King] were the earliest of my instructors and mentors.

Speaking of Paul Robeson, you saw how much he risked his life and career to be outspoken about his political views. Why did you want to take similar risks?

I can only interpret my life and my purpose in being here as ascribed to that behavior and into that fact. What is the measure of a gift? What is the measure of a reward if there is a public that wants you? “We like you, we listen to you, we’re willing to be led by what your voice of moral sense tells us.” If you have all of that at your disposal, what else in life can you do to serve it?

Robeson knew the evils that were put upon him. He met them every day. It led him to a place in life where he his heart was severely broken: those who abandoned him, those who cursed him, those who saw him as an obstructionist to vanity and riches. They did not understand him and what he had given us in a much bigger sense …

You know, Jesus does not stand alone. There are lot of Jesuses in the world. We just haven’t seen them all. I don’t suggest that there is a being superior to the mission, to the kindness, to the goodness that that man of Nazareth presented to us.

There are many who are anointed, and so was Paul Robeson. In what I saw in Paul, I saw the measure of my own life. I saw the light that could guide me. If I had all this power, I could get seven more houses and more yachts, but what does that mean to life?

How do you process or view the fact that because the choices you made to be an advocate for certain causes that it may have negatively affected your career as an entertainer? Do you feel if you hadn’t made those choices that you would have gone as far in your entertainment career as your friend Sidney Poitier?

You know, if you walk into the vineyard, you’ll see many kinds of grapes hanging from the line. You do have a choice.

There’s a lot about Sidney that has puzzled and makes me wonder. He’s the closest person in my life that parallels so much of our journey together. He’s eight days older than I am. I try to never let him forget that.

But how fortunate for me that he came along at the time that he did, because those things that we came up against … there were different goals to be reached. There were adversarial things coming at us. I don’t think a better actor could have been picked to become the first real revelation of the power of black manhood.

All those previous images that had been used to crucify us as a people, for one fleeting moment, it was embodied in this Adonis who rose from the ranks to become the first big [African-American] screen star. He was not the first star. Long before him, there was Paul Robeson. Robeson did it in a mighty way, but he paid a price for the choices that he made. I chose the Robeson road.

Sidney went another way, but he never turned his back when approached to become more deeply engaged in the movement. I left Sidney to become his own instructor. I have no right to demand that you be what I want you to be. I’ve got to [support] your right to be who you want to be.

I find honor in him. I find some baffling moments in him. There are all kinds of things in Sidney. But mostly, I find a man who dealt the hand that was given him, played them, and gave the best he could. I wished he’d looked a little more at my hand. He would’ve had more fun!

I’m going to be doing something at the Lincoln Center [in New York City] to honor him [with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 38th annual Chaplin Award], and I’ll use that moment to say to him, “That really tells you how old you are, because when you get to that lifetime achievement sh*t, you know that you’re one of the things left in the bottom of the barrel.” But I’m going to be there to celebrate him, in the hopes that somebody will be there to celebrate my turn when it comes.

I find that life puzzles me more than gives me solution. I am more now touched by whatever it is that I don’t know than what I should have known. And that much has served me throughout my life.

When I was 17 and went off to war, I felt a lot of things about what was going on with fascism and how it invaded Africa and what the Italians did to the Ethiopian people and what colonialism did to Africa and all those things, I made some selections.

My mother was the force in my life that made the difference. Her tenaciousness, her strength against poverty and dealing with the issues, her own strength and dignity and not letting her children ever bow or be burned was a gift — and I could not betray that.

I have to look at what this film ["Sing My Song"] is about. When I set out to do it, I had no idea where I was going with it. I just knew that Marlon [Brando] died, a great friend, and in his obituary in the New York Times, I realized that he took an awful lot of stories with him. There were a lot of things that Marlon did with the Native Americans and the Black Panthers, where he stood until wee hours of the morning …

And I just said, “Wow. He’s gone, and there’s no one to tell his story.” And then I looked around, and I saw some other friends had gone more quickly than I’d wished them to go, and I said, “Let me take a moment to find the resources and grab those who can still have the gift of memory, and let me ask questions, and get something out here that might help the generations that don’t know those stories, to find not only themselves but to find honor in what it is these men and women did.”

Let us take a look at Bobby Kennedy. It wasn’t all roses when he started, but I wish to God we’d been served a better moment in our history. Had Bobby Kennedy lived, America would be a very different place today.

In “Sing Your Song,” you express some guilt or anxiety over how some of society’s problems that you’ve been fighting against have actually gotten worse since you became an activist decades ago. Do you think that your generation fumbled the pass or did the younger generation drop the baton?

I think it’s both. When I spoke with Nelson [Mandela] on this very subject, his response was that it would behoove us not to become complacent, not to begin to find justification that absolves us of a sense of responsibility for the consequences we are experiencing. Somewhere, we made a mistake. Somewhere, we were not endowed with enough vision and foresight to do things. Somewhere in the pass-off, we didn’t sacrifice enough to make sure that those who were receiving the baton received it properly.

That, however, does not dismiss the glory of turning around, picking it up, and going on with the race. I look at this as a [map] legend by which I have life’s motive. There is more race to be run. There are more people to be engaged.

There was a generation that picked it up in a big way. My children — in particular Gina, my daughter [one of the producers of "Sing Your Song"] — and I’ve had the extreme fortune to have a man, ["Sing Your Song" producer] Michael Cohl …who gave us the money to make ["Sing Your Song"].

And then there were 800 hours of footage. That’s a lot of story, and we only saw [the final cut] in an hour and 44 [minutes]. If it hadn’t been for ["Sing Your Song" writer/director/editor] Susanne Rostock, who is a remarkable gift as a cinema artist, her vision, her sense of where one moment touched another, and you could make the linkage of this way … if we had not been walked through the labyrinth by a genius, if I had not been touched by genius … if it had not been for Michael [Cohl] and another investor by the name of Julius Nasso … Life hands you a lot of things. It’s how you make the fruit salad of what you have with the ingredients at your disposal.

I watch you [Tavis Smiley] every night, every night that I’m able to, because sometimes I’m in parts of the world where you haven’t come lately — but we can fix that. I watched you grapple with guests who are exciting and other who are not so exciting, and you try to make as much out of both as you possibly can. The struggle is in part to bring people to a more enlightened place. That’s all I’ve done, but I’m proud to have enjoyed my trip all the way.

In “Sing Your Song,” you talk about the power of art for resistance and rebellion. Do you still believe that to be true?

Excuse me for a moment of severe arrogance, but I think art is the only force that does that. You are anointed in a very special way when you accept the gift of art. Art is the gatekeepers of history and the protectors of truth. That is how we define art.

Even what you know about religion is there at the behest of what artists rendered. What you read, see, hear in storytellers, art is replete with everything in our lives that we know about each other and we know about the unknown. It is art that indelibly describes that stuff and gives us a chance to reach.

I don’t really know who wrote the Book of Genesis. I don’t really know who did all of the Old Testament … But somewhere, artists, writers, thinkers played a big part in giving us a sense of destiny, a sense of our reason for being. And we just have to take that and go on and perfect it, make it less mysterious, and yet have it delve more deeply into the mysteries. There’s the thought.

Story originally appeared at Examiner

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One Response to “Harry Belafonte Advocates People to ‘Sing Your Song’ Through Social Activism”

Nomusa Xaba says:

July 30, 2011 at 11:24 am

I just viewed Sing Your Song as part of the International Film Festival here in Durban South Africa. It was indeed an awesome experience to see Mr. Belafonte bring to life the 50′s – now through his own unique lens. We must tell the truth to ourselves about ourselves, then tell the truth about ourselves to someone else in order to finally just “tell the truth”. Thank you Mr. Belafonte for bringing to life many of the truths that I have and am continuing to live through. Peace and Love are the only real answers to the selfishness we see in the world.

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