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• "Harry Belafonte, the Lion at 80"
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Actor and activist tells about the time he filled in for Johnny Carson and interviewed his good friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on "The Tonight Show." (3:32)
 

Actor-activist reflects on his friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (22:58)
 

Tavis: I am always pleased and honored to welcome Harry Belafonte to this program. The legendary actor, singer, and activist shared a close and abiding friendship with Dr. King, of course, dating all the way back to the fifties. Years after King's death, Mr. B was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize, and it is, Mr. B., as I said, an honor to see you again.

Harry Belafonte: Good to see you.

Tavis: How you been, man?

Belafonte: Pretty good. A little - little - I've been chasing a lot, but I've been running after good things. I used to know what was running behind me, but I have to every now and then peek to see if it's the same force.

Tavis: Yeah, well, it's hard to catch you, you put so much distance between you and whatever is behind you, it's going to be a long time to catch up. I said to you before you came on the set that I have been in this sacred space so many times, room 306 sits just above us right now. I've been in this sacred space so many times, but never with you.

And what I feel now, sitting with you in this space, given that I never had a chance to meet Dr. King, I really can't find the words to explain it but I'm honored that you took the time to come sit and talk to me, so thank you, first of all, just for being in this space with me. Having said that, take me all the way back to when, where, and how you first met Martin King.

Belafonte: I was in New York and I got a call - this was in the early 1950s, mid-1950s. When I answered the phone he asked for me and I said I was speaking and he said, "This is Martin Luther King Jr., and I don't know if you know me, but I welcome the opportunity to chat with you."

And I said, "Well, I think there's hardly any Black person in America that doesn't know you, because it was just at the dawning of the Montgomery campaign. But he was coming to New York to speak to the ecumenical community, and he was doing it at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Adam Clayton Powell was alive then, and he was the pastor.

And he said, "Before or after that, if we could meet for just a few minutes, I'd appreciate it." So I went to hear him speak and I was quite taken with his oratory. Then we went downstairs into the basement of the church, and what was supposed to have been just about 20 minutes lasted in the vicinity of four hours, and in that time, I had heard a voice and was privileged to enter into a mind that really held great substance and deeply attracted me.

And I left that room knowing that I'd be in his service as long as service was required. Now like many, I thought that our journey would be fairly brief. I had no idea that that simple act of a Black woman sitting on a bus and a country preacher emerging from the ranks of a little, unknown place would have had such universal consequence.

The entire time of his - the rest of his life, there's hardly a day that we didn't speak and have some business to take care of.

Tavis: You've said so much now that I want to go back and kind of excavate. Let me just pick it apart a piece at a time. In no particular order, number one, you and I have had any number of private conversations about this - let me go public with a little bit of our private conversation. You are a spiritual person. I'll paraphrase it my way or put it my way; you disabuse me, as you so often do, and correct me where I'm wrong, as you so often do.

You are a spiritual person, to be sure. I've never known you to be a religious person; you're not a church person in that way. And yet that's the tradition that this young man who you were befriending was in. He was coming to you out of that tradition. How did one who had your spiritual makings so conjoin, so connect with one who was deeply religious, deeply spiritual, deeply in the church, and yet you become the best of friends?

Belafonte: Although I had not much regard for the church, because I was born into the church, I was a Catholic, and I found the experiences within the Catholic environment very inhumane, and it did not do much to nurture my affection for the church, my mother was a deeply spiritual woman, and the people of our tribe and our community in the Caribbean were very spiritually connected. That spirituality carried with it a great sense of morality and ethics, and a remarkable courage. Those qualities, I have gotten from her.

At the age of about 16, when I was old enough, I distanced myself from the church, but I had not lost my relationship to either moral thought, I certainly have not lost my sense of spiritual being. I did not reengage specifically any relationship to church business until I met Dr. King, and I informed him early on that I believed deeply in the creator, I believed deeply in the existence of God. I was deeply rooted in the teachings of Christ, but Christ had no church, and I saw no wrong if I sought to not pay homage to these man-created edifices which I think did more to worship man and his ego than it did to really worship the teachings of Christ, and follow what I thought was a higher moral purpose.

Tavis: Did King ever try to disabuse you of that point of view?

Belafonte: No, as a matter of fact, what really brought us closer together was he said, "I have been tempted in that direction quite often." (Laughter) He said, "However, if I left the church, having grown up in it, and my father and all, I'm not too sure it would be the end of the line, so it's easier to stay than it is to leave."

But in a very serious way he felt - one would have to read his "Letters from a Birmingham Jail" to have some insight as to how he really viewed the clergy. The occasion of his incarceration gave him opportunity to write to a thought that he had embraced for a very long time.

And the work that I do now, which is mostly connected to people caught up in the prison culture - young men and women in gangs and ex-cons, people looking for a way - it was Dr. King who pointed out that the last person, persons, with whom Christ exchanged words in his mortal construct were two convicts on either side of him.

Tavis: That's right.

Belafonte: And I think that men wrote the bible. There's a lot of contradictions in what the bible has to say, because men wrote them and men are flawed, and men see things in different ways. But there was a common consensus in the stories of the bible that Christ spoke to the two convicts, and he said, "Oh this day, you shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven."

And he often referred to that, because he tried very hard to penetrate the gang culture. He said, "If I could corral those young men into some belief, into a deeper belief of nonviolence, I think I would have a solid core of courageous beings who would guarantee that our movement would be a success, but I have not been able to conquer that pursuit."

Tavis: You mentioned a moment ago, Mr. B., the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." On this program tomorrow night, we will have your longtime colleague and friend, Clarence B. Jones, Dr. King's personal attorney, who for most of his 77 years of living has been silent about - at least publicly silent - about his relationship with Dr. King.

He's written a new book we'll talk about tomorrow night with him on this program called "What Would Martin Say?" "What Would Martin Say?" I raise his name because as you know, he was the one that snuck the pen and paper into the jail on which King wrote that Birmingham letter, and he snuck it out and got it published. And so he's on this program tomorrow night.

But I raise that since you referenced it because again, the title of his book is "What Would Martin Say?" And I wonder if Martin's - one of Martin's closest friends, whether or not it troubles you that so many people, for their own political reasons and agendas, today try to suggest publicly what Martin would say about X, Y, or Z. Do you ever get troubled by people trying to say what Martin, suggest what Martin would say about these various issues?

Belafonte: I only get troubled when people say what I know Martin would not say. (Laughter) There are many who have quoted Dr. King and things that he's said who have done so accurately. And more than just quoting what Dr. King has said, I think one is required to look at what motivates a person quoting Dr. King.

There are a lot of people who quote him, but don't quote him for righteous reasons - who quote him for personal gain, who quote him in order to cloak themselves through his memory while anointing themselves. There are a lot of - there's a lot of that out there.

It is important that people quote Dr. King; that keeps his message alive. But I think it would be better if we had an opportunity to study more deeply the life of King and to know all that he did, to know more about who he was than just looking at his life in sound bites. I think we should know more about his speech in Washington than just the "I have a dream" portion that has been alluded to, even by you on several occasions.

The speech was far more substantive, it went more deeply into life and struggle and what he was about. But Americans need to feel good and be blinded to the deeper truth of its history, takes the high ground or the light ground on quoting many things that Black people have said or done, while leaving the deeper substance totally unattended.

And I think were Dr. King alive today, first of all, were he alive, we would not be where we are. And if he were alive, I think that he would have a view of our current adventure that would not sit well with him.

Tavis: When you say that were he alive, we would not be where we are, unpack that for me.

Belafonte: I think the power that he revealed, the objects of his pursuit, forced people to measure their own existence. It certainly did for me. Each time we met and spoke and he came upon some moment of froth of problems and difficulty, he reached into a deeper self to find the answer.

For instance, one of the most difficult moments we had - and this is just spontaneously coming out of my head, I didn't particularly think of it till now - was when we first had to encounter Bobby Kennedy. And Bobby Kennedy had a history of not being very favorable to those who represented our cause. He had no use for people of the left, he'd crucified many in the work that he did with the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee.

He was very rich, very Irish, very Catholic, very removed from things that were familiarly the environment of Black people. And when he became the attorney general, given how much of our campaign necessarily needed us to integrate with the federal government and constitutional questions meant we had to do business with Bobby, and we saw that as a very dark time.

Well, when Dr. King was then required to give us some instruction or thought, he said, "I understand fully what all have said here." Clarence Jones was there as well. He said, "But I will tell you that our business is with the federal government. Without them, our journey will be nigh on impossible." And he said, "So your task is with all that Bobby Kennedy may have been, go find his moral center and win him to our cause."

Well, none of us could ever have thought of him or doing that in that way. None of us saw Bobby Kennedy as necessarily a force that we could redeem from some good place to do good things. And yet that instruction, which forced many of us to work specifically towards that end, included Bobby Kennedy at the end of his life having fulfilled a high moral code, a deeply, deeply spiritual man who was deeply touched by Black suffering and the suffering of the poor.

His campaign at the end of his time, running for the presidency, embraced a lot of thoughts and ideas that are not reflected in any of the discourse that takes place today with many of our politicians who are running for high office.

Tavis: Every time I'm in your presence, you look like you're about 40 or 50, but we know you are now on the other side of 80 with your chronologically gifted self. And every time I'm in your presence I'm always taken aback at - civil rights is part and parcel of your larger life's work for human rights. Civil rights is just a part of your larger work and witness on human rights. And I wonder whether or not you made a conscious decision to become an actorvist or for some other reason you got pulled into it.

Because it seems to me that you knew - you had to know, at the height of your popularity in Hollywood, that mixing your politics with your art might cause you some trouble down the road. And yet it never for one moment hindered you.

Belafonte: I had not much time to wrestle with that choice. I am driven by things that I don't quite understand. Much of what I'm about, I truly don't know how I came to it. I mean, I know in the intellectual sense. I know that coincidences appeared and I made choice. But there is a voice - my mother was possessed of that voice. Paul Robeson was possessed of that voice. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. King and Fanny Lou Hamer and others were possessed of that voice.

I am just one note in a chord that makes a harmonic sound that gives me the sense of what I must do and where I must go without much debate. When I first acquired the platform of celebrity, and you know, Paul Robeson once said to me, "Get them to sing your song" when he heard me sing the first time. He said, "You're on a great adventure. Get them to sing your song. They'll want to know who you are."

And I didn't understand how prophetic that remark was and what was behind that metaphor. And so one day I woke up without any sense that it would be that way, and the whole world was singing a song called "Day-O." A lot of people find humor in it and joy in it. I just reached into the roots of my own childhood and the people of my family, who worked on the plantations of the Caribbean for the United Fruit Company, cutting cane and cutting banana, and I just reached into that pool of culture for my song, my voice, when my time came.

I have no idea that what would happen to it did, and when that gave me the platform to be launched into a world for which I was very, very ill-prepared, the first question was "What do I do with it?" The only example I had was Paul Robeson. What do you do with power? What do you do with celebrity? What do you do with a certain kind of Blackness in the face of how much Blackness there is around that does such a large variety of things?

And it is in that context that I had a guiding force. I followed. I follow a voice. Dr. King spoke to me, and I heard him. I knew that I would follow his voice.

Tavis: I'm going to put you on the spot now, and your memory's awfully good, but you were once hosting - I love this story, told to me by Mr. Belafonte - you were once hosting "The Tonight Show." I don't think Carson had the show then, was it Jack Parr still hosting? And you were filling in, though.

Belafonte: I was filling for the - the first time a week had been given to any host for Johnny Carson.

Tavis: Johnny Carson was hosting, okay. So you're -

Belafonte: February of 1964.

Tavis: Ah, see that? (Laughter) He did that just to embarrass me, just to say to me, "Yes, Negro, I remember, of course my memory's good."

Belafonte: No, my mistake. No, it's my mistake - it was February of '68.

Tavis: See, he corrected himself. All right. So he's sitting there for Johnny Carson for a week on "The Tonight Show" and because of their friendship, only Harry Belafonte could get Dr. King - he didn't do this - only Mr. B. could get Dr. King to sit down for a conversation on "The Tonight Show."

King flies from Atlanta to New York, he's running late, trying to get to the show, which is live. He lands at the airport, and I'll let Mr. B. pick the story up and take it all the way through to the joke that he told opening the show. You take it and run with it. You remember this, don't you?

Belafonte: Yes, I do.

Tavis: All right, tell the story. I love it.

Belafonte: By the time we went on air, Dr. King had not arrived. So we made a quick adjustment to fill his slot and how we would cover the spot. About a quarter of the way into the show Dr. King showed up, so we could go back to plan A. And when he came on air, he didn't give me a chance to do very much but hug him and greet him and he sat, and he said, "I must beg your forgiveness for the consternation and the cause of anxiety here," he said, "But I have had my own experience.

"I left Atlanta late, the plane was late, I got to the airport, I got into the cab, the driver recognized me, and he said, 'What are you doing in town?' And I told him that I was late coming for this broadcast with you. And all he had to hear was that I was late, and that man hit the gas and took me on a drive that was the most nervous experience of my life.

"He zoomed in and out of traffic, and I had to tap him on the shoulder and said, 'Sir, if you don't mind, I appreciate your sense of urgency but I'd rather be known as Martin Luther King late than the late Martin Luther King.'" (Laughter)

Tavis: Told brilliantly. King tells that story on "The Tonight Show" and the joked killed.

Belafonte: Absolutely.

Tavis: And it gave people a rare glimpse at a man that you knew up close who was actually rather funny.

Belafonte: But it gave me an opportunity to lead into a question that was rebroadcast several times, because I asked him, in fact, how did he feel about death, and did he fear for his life? And he took that moment to reveal for the first time before a large American audience that he had come to peace with the idea of death.

That he really was not deeply distracted by about life as an experience of just a longevity; he was concerned about the quality of life and how he used it. And that fact stood indelibly in my mind, because during the earlier years he had developed a psychological tic. He constantly had occasion to go into hiccups, and he would just silently.

And I asked him about it. He just said, "I don't know, I just feel anxiety, and whenever I have anxiety, that comes about." And I noticed that over a number of days or weeks, recently, that was no longer evident. And he said it was because he had come to peace with the issue of death.

Tavis: They say that every race of people ought to be judged by the best they have been able to produce. Harry Belafonte is part of the best that we have ever produced, not just as Black people but as Americans, as the human race, and I am always honored to be in his presence. And I thank you, sir, for sharing your memories.

Belafonte: Thank you for having me.

Tavis: My pleasure.