Hello and welcome to this special edition of Black Horizons.

I'm Chris Moore.

My guest through the courtesy of Slippery Rock University is Mr.

Harry Belafonte and he's with us now.

We'll have a conversation with him right now.

Welcome to Pittsburgh.

Welcome to Slippery Rock.

Indeed, welcome, welcome, welcome.

As we used to say in my old church, welcome once, welcome twice, welcome thrice, welcome, welcome, welcome.

Just like to make you feel at home if I can.

Well, if nothing else does, that certainly will.

Okay.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

You are here to talk at Slippery Rock about Dr.

King.

Your close association with him in the movement and the things that you did.

What would you have people know about Dr.

King?

I run into so many students who seem to recite by rote.

Dr.

King was a man who fought for it and I wonder if we really know the true measure of the man.

You knew him.

I'm not too sure that anybody really knows the true measure of the man based upon the kind of information that's been disseminated since the civil rights movement and certainly since his death.

Our history books, I think, are quite meager in the information, not only about Dr.

King as a personality, but certainly that whole period of history.

And although we do have the celebration in January on the 15th of every year, it does much to focus for at least that moment on the values of Dr.

King, what the struggle was about, and in many ways still is.

But it's hardly enough to encompass the might of what was achieved and what was tried during that period by a man who was quite unique to his family, to his community, and certainly to his country and the world at large.

Dr.

King, as a matter of fact, if there's one thing that Dr.

King has certainly left in terms of the hope of the future is that when this country was in desperate need of leadership and we were looking around, existing leaders were ill-equipped or certainly not up to the job of leading the nation where it had to go.

And in that quandary, in that vacuum, Rosa Parks, sitting on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, her feet hurt, ignited a passion for justice and freedom that was eternal in the bosoms and the hearts of the peoples of this country.

And when we were wondering who could lead this mighty crusade, out of nowhere came this young preacher from a small tiny church in Montgomery, Alabama.

And the wonderment of him coming out of nowhere to lead us was almost divine intervention.

And behind him came a host of men and women who were truly remarkable human beings, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Andrew Young, young Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, names that people are somewhat familiar with today.

All those were unknown quantities, all those were unknown faces and hearts and minds, but they emerged.

And now it appeared when we are desperately in need of visionaries, minds that are attuned to the need for human rights and justice and fair play, I take great spirit in the fact that history and divine intervention may be kind to us once again and out of nowhere will emerge a crop of new leaders since the ones who now existed, faltered and in many instances failed in taking us to the next level.

I don't mean if that was done out of any mischief or out of any maliciousness or the absence of a certain kind of vigilance, it was just a huge number of coincidences of circumstance that came together that gave us this result.

And the kind of courage and the kind of spirit that we need is hard to come by and I suspect that it's out here.

That's why I go to Slippery Rock.

A lot of people say why such a small college.

I said well why not?

I've been to all the big colleges, Harvard hasn't given us very much, although a lot of good guys are now at Harvard, Connell West, and Henry Louis Gates and others, but you know it's in the little places in the world where I think more often than not our greatest hope.

And I think that speaks to the way that we in hindsight revere Dr.

King or anyone, Ella Baker, any of the people that you named, Fannie Lou Hamer, any of those people, we revere them as giants of a movement, but they were really everyday people who got, as Fannie Lou Hamer would say, sick and tired of being sick and tired and they stood up.

They picked a time and a place in history to stand up and say no more we're going to change this.

And it could happen anywhere.

As you say, who is the next person?

In the old series once, everybody was asking all the black people when a baby was born, is you the one, is you the one?

They never knew.

Yeah.

I feel that I was very fortunate in that life took the turn that led me into the association that I had with Dr.

King.

He was two years younger than I and when we met, I looked at him with absolute fascination and amazement.

And when he asked me to become a part of the journey, his journey, it was at the bottom of a church in Harlem, Abyssinia.

He had come to New York City seeking support and he thought that perhaps his first stop should be with the black clergy.

And at that time, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, who was the head of that church, offered the church as a place of convening for that meeting.

And he called me from Montgomery and told me that he was coming to New York.

And would I take a meeting with him?

And I went and I heard him speak to the ministers and then we met in the basement of the church.

And after two hours, I told him that I would gladly and willingly take the walk with him.

I wasn't quite ready for what we do.

You say fortunate, but in fact, people may not know it, but you probably put your career on the line many times.

I'm sure there must have been theatrical agents, movie producers, record producers, who would often say to you, "Hey, what do you think you're doing with this radical Dr.

King kind of guy?"

I remember seeing pictures of you marching.

I remember seeing pictures of other actors marching, but I don't know the time frame.

But you got out there.

You put your career on the line, so to speak, as well as your life.

I tell you that I really had no choice.

I think it's impossible to grow up as I did in New York City, under the oppressive heel of racism and the absence of opportunity.

And then I wake up one day and find myself with a platform and the ability to articulate not only about where life should be, but certainly for those who are in great need of someone speaking on the behalf of the kind of struggle we all had to face.

And when I was faced with the decision of having to go on the line, it wasn't that difficult.

Yes, I did pay a price.

Endorsements, a lot of things that I could have done, a lot of films that I could have made were not given to me because I was considered terribly controversial.

I wasn't clean enough for the American power elite.

But I tell you, I really lost nothing, and I gained everything because I can't think of anything that was withheld that could possibly take the place of the experiences that I've had with the people that we've just mentioned, Dr.

King, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Eleanor Roosevelt, sitting in the White House conversing and debating with John Kennedy, or in the Justice Department with Bobby Kennedy, helping to define and redefine what we were about is a far more qualitative experience and a far richer thing to have had in my life than the things that I was denied.

I read a book called "Parting the Waters" once, written by Taylor Branch about Dr.

King, which really credited you a great deal with raising money for the movement among influential and money people in New York.

When Dr.

King was trying to get people who had been arrested out on bail and didn't have a penny and didn't know where he would turn, quite often you would provide a conduit for the money to get kids out of jail, the same kids who faced Bull Connor and Laurie Pritchett and all the other southern sheriffs who would lock people up readily and try to drain the movement knowing that we weren't rich.

A lot of people don't know that you did those kinds of, it's not just the marching, it was a deeper commitment and behind that was a commitment by some other Americans with money who thought it was the right thing to do.

That's true, like all things in the world, economics plays a significant part.

In the Civil Rights Movement it was absolutely important to the heartbeat of the movement.

We had no resources, people understood that.

The criminal justice system as a matter of fact, understanding that fact made life a living hell for us.

Much of the money that we'd have needed to move, to push the movement ahead was lost in bail and lost in funds that were seriously tied up by the courts.

Most of those courts were in the south and when we did put up bail money, sometimes we'd have to wait as long as a year or two years before the money was even returned and we have to constantly be inventive and creative about how we would raise money and I think that that had its virtue and it had its reward because when we got to a point when we were seriously crippled economically, I suggested to Dr.

King and members of the SCLC that we said perhaps take our cause to the global community and that we should not just stay dependent upon domestic whim and that led us to go to Europe.

The first time Dr.

King went to Paris and the second time he went to Sweden and the people of Europe were very very responsive.

We went up to Canada and we began to broaden the base and in doing that in an economic quest we're also able to touch the hearts and minds of people who began to know more about our struggle and what fascinates me is that here we are all these years later in a global community that is in great upheaval looking for justice, looking for equality, looking to end racism and all other kinds of oppression.

Everywhere I go freedom struggles, people are singing we shall overcome.

In Tiananmen Square.

That's right, absolutely.

The same thing that must bring a real warm spot.

I see the smile on your face.

Well it just you know it it just says to me that the journey was worth it and it meant an awful lot to an awful, to many people in the world.

You talk about vision.

I can recall I'm a Vietnam veteran and in the 60s when I went to Vietnam I struggled personally with was this the right thing to do and I remember Dr.

King being one of the first, not just first blacks, but one of the first to come out and oppose the war in Vietnam and I remember so many pundits saying all the civil rights movement is dead now, wouldn't that?

What is Dr.

King doing?

And it wasn't until I came back from Vietnam and actually had been there to see some of the injustice that was going on that it was a poor man's war and all those other things that went along with that to see the wisdom and the kind of vision Dr.

King had and his call for human rights versus civil rights which a lot of people still don't understand.

It's really global isn't it?

Not only is it global but what fascinates me is that Dr.

King's call for human rights which was so vigorously denounced by many, many who are quite powerful that it should have played out in the final analysis to be the most important call in global affairs.

America as a matter of fact is central to its foreign policy is always the question of human rights.

We will not do this unless there's human rights.

We will not do that unless there's human rights and to have found that this now has become central to our vocabulary in foreign policy when in fact 30 years ago we were seeking to deny its existence or its need even is once again you know a kind of poetic justice.

The Vietnam War and Dr.

King's decision to take that on was perhaps the single most difficult decision he had to make.

There are three that I know of that were very difficult and one was certainly the Vietnam War but Dr.

King felt a moral imperative.

He was nonviolent as we all know.

He thought the war was a cruel and an unjust war for all of its participants that this country and others in the world had been faced with several opportunities to do what had to be done in a peaceful process and we thought that with our power and with our might we did not have to go to a negotiation or a peaceful process.

After the French fled Dien Bien Phu and Ho Chi Minh and at that time President Dien had struck a bargain on what to do with North and South Vietnam.

It was we who threw that policy out and as a matter of fact when Dien was assassinated there are many who will tell you that the process in arriving at that decision was bitterly opposed by Bobby Kennedy, one of the more virtuous things that he had attempted to do.

So Dr.

King took on a very significant responsibility when he decided to merge the destiny of struggling people in this country with the destinies of others in our planet and I think his insight and his vision was correct and I think extremely important and I think America finally displayed the best side of itself when it embraced that concept.

You must get asked this question a lot and I don't know how I'll just ask it because I don't know how you even reflect on it but given the state of many of our urban communities right now I'm working on a local special on violence and yesterday we were in one of the neighborhoods or the hoods as the young brothers call it and we were down in the cut where graffiti is and many of these young men have no hope they can't go beyond the four square blocks of their community without having to fight for their lives.

They can't take a bus downtown to go apply for a job without having to fight for their lives and it's not based so much on colors but they recognize faces and what hood you're from and we end up fighting one another.

The statistics tell us that the greatest danger to a 15-year-old black kid is another 15-year-old black kid with a weapon and we know we don't make the guns but we certainly pick them up and use them.

What do you think knowing Dr.

King having known Malcolm X, what would these two great men say about our state of affairs in the hood today?

I think that there are certain things that are quite self-evident.

America is racist, self-evident.

America is oppressive and cruel to its underclass regardless of color, self-evident.

Ask Native Americans, ask Latinos, ask white folk living in Appalachia who are decent people who are minors and whatnot.

That's a given.

What I think Dr.

King would perhaps be spending a lot of his time looking at if he were here today.

First of all, were he here this wouldn't exist.

I firmly believe that.

Were he and John and Bobby Kennedy and others Malcolm here and have they played their lives out?

I think world history would have been in a very different place but given that it's like it is Dr.

King I think would have been perhaps most critical of the black community itself.

In the beginning, during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement there were less than 300 black elected officials in America.

Most of them are on the lowest rung of the political ladder.

Now today there's over 8,000 on every level of the political ladder.

Governors, mayors, senators, congresspersons, the legislature spills over with black voices.

Certainly in mass media, television whether it's you or others who are on the networks who are anchor people and talk hosts.

Whether you look at some industry there are black people sitting in key jobs ahead of Coca-Cola company and other places.

The grave question would be how could there be this might?

How could there be 8,000 black elected officials in this country?

How could there be this black elite?

And yet we are so voiceless when it comes time to speak about the underclass of our own community.

When we speak about the hood, the boys in the hood.

I mean you spend your time in Pittsburgh.

I spend a great deal of time, although I live in New York, with Fred Williams and the Bloods and the Crips in Los Angeles hammering out the peace treaty and trying to sustain that.

We've brought money to a lot of gangs that have convened nationally and trying to get a gang conference and a summit for peace.

It is the absence I think of a significant attention by the black elite who have abandoned their responsibility I think to the black community because they're now dealing with a class situation.

They got where they are, both of them, by pleading the black question.

Now that they've gotten there they plead the class question.

I don't want to rock the boat.

I don't want to change the equilibrium now that I have mine.

My job is really to get reelected and I will say that which is necessary in order to ensure that I'm in office again.

Well, just to have you there in longevity means nothing.

What about the quality of the time that you have had to give us?

And I think that Dr.

King and Malcolm and others would perhaps be severely critical and not just to denounce but trying to find a way to inspire that the black elite, all these intellectuals, all these college graduates and people, would begin to re-examine what we have done with our newfound power and re-direct it towards the needs of the inner cities and those young lives that are being lost because the role models which they see on television is not quite the same as the role models I had when I lived in a segregated America because no matter how poor I was when I walked the street I had to pass Paul Robeson or Dr.

Du Bois or Langston Hughes or Joe Louis because segregation kept the community together.

We touched our role models, our role models in our churches, in our communities, counseled us.

Well now in today's success they're all gone to those suburban places, into those loftier places and many have been left to the whim of the new congress.

So should the suits, that's what the brothers in the hood yesterday told me, that's what they called it, the suits need to take off their suits, need to come back to the hood, put on some blue jeans and walk and talk with them.

And get ready for a fight, don't be afraid of it, there's a fight coming.

I think it's going to be one of the biggest fights America's ever seen.

I've heard that prediction before, do you think it'll go to the final stage of revolution?

Will it be violent or will it be the kind of fight Dr.

King weighs?

Well now the final stage of revolution doesn't always have to be violent.

Okay well people tell me that's the highest stage.

It'll go to the next stage of the evolutionary process and I think it could get violent because those who are in the deep in the business of oppression, these people who speak about the new contract with America is pushing it to a hostile place.

You cannot heap the indecencies that these men and women from the right-wing forces in America, the white evangelical Christian elite who speak about what they speak about, they're talking about doing battle on the poor, killing off the lame, the wounded, the helpless and I think they're not going to just sit back and let that happen without some confrontation.

And to bear out what I'm saying, I don't mean necessarily in an organized way.

If you take a look at Rodney King and what happened in Los Angeles when injustice appeared upon the scene to people who were deeply frustrated, that city went up in flames to the tune of millions, the largest rebellion that you've ever seen in this country in modern America took place and I think there are a lot of those fuses waiting to be lit.

Those who are insensitive to our problems say well we don't care, we're going to send the army, the military in and quell it but it's not going to be quite that easy.

I've heard a number of people say we don't care when it comes to young brothers in the hood, when it comes to rebellion, riot, however it is phrased, they say they don't care.

Give them all guns, let them stay over there and let them kill one another.

That callousness adds fuel to the fire, I think.

Well it's part of its callousness but there's also something else.

The brothers in the hood will tell you we're dying anyway.

Don't murder.

I'm going to die, at least let me die for something.

Let me take something out with me that says at least I walked this way and something courageous happened.

I think that it is an unfortunate way to have to go but I think unless those who are responsible human beings begin to focus on this reality and begin to bring counsel and wisdom and humanity to the table, I think we're leaving people with no alternative.

Where are the Viola Liuzzo?

Where are the Schwerner's and Chaney's and Goodman's black, white, so many people, the Fannie Lou Hamer's who nobody knew of, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that would just, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, good people who came together and said no we're not going to do this.

You hope that they're still out there?

Oh I know they're out there.

All those people who would never have known had there been that a movement and something happening for them to rally to.

Everybody's waiting for the rally and cry.

And now powerful rich white folks have had the rally and cried to the contract with America.

They're going to kill off welfare, they're going to build more prisons, they're going to send all of our kids to orphanages.

That's a battle cry.

That's a war.

That's not just a little social intervention to change the complexion of life as they know it.

That's war and I think people are going to respond to that and I think in that context you'll see a lot of new voices since the old voices are now obsolete and not doing the job.

You use the term that I use all the time.

You just said white folks.

Whenever I use it on the KDKA or other radio station where people get inflamed.

And I never say it in a pejorative fashion but no matter how I say it, black folks too.

They seem to get inflamed.

I don't mean the pejorative sense either but I mean racism has to have somebody of one color deal with somebody else of another color.

Are there blacks who feed into the racist problem by oppressing their own?

Yes.

I mean we have judges sitting on benches that will attest to the fact that they don't think much of black folk and will send down opinions to that effect.

But it is a sharply defined line that causes racism and the people that I hear out here spouting out new prisons and spouting and the leadership of that are all white.

And sometimes with the complicity of those blacks who want to remain in their highfalutin places too.

Yeah.

But it's the white that has the power.

Mr.

Palafani, thank you.

It was my pleasure talking to you.

It was a quick half hour.

I really appreciate you coming and spending some time with us.

I'm very grateful to Slippery Rock.

All right.

We're grateful to Slippery Rock too.

And I hope you enjoyed this program with Harry Belafonte.

I'm Chris Moore.

I only have one more thing to say to you.

And you know what it is.

Bye.