[Mb-civic] Harry Belafonte

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Tally Mon Come, Name Belafonte
The Singer's Latest Hits Find an Enthusiastic
Audience in Washington

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 2, 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/04/01/AR20060401
01435.htm

Even friends who most appreciate the complicated
package that is Harry Belafonte hark back to that
simple soundtrack of America getting its first black
matinee idol -- cheesy as the calypso sweetness might
seem half a hip-hopping century later.

As Belafonte enters a banquet hall at Howard University
Friday to receive an award from TransAfrica Forum,
there it is, sea-breezing out of the sound system:
Day-o, day-ay-ay-o . . . Come, Mr. Tally Mon, tally me
banana; Daylight come and me wanna go home . . .

The luncheon crowd of 225 civil rights activists,
foreign policy idealists, celebrities (Danny Glover)
and ambassadors (Hugo Chavez's emissary from Venezuela)
gives a hip-swaying standing ovation. A big screen
flashes snapshots of a career -- Belafonte with Martin
Luther King Jr., Jack and Bobby Kennedy, a giant bunch
of bananas. But what the crowd most wants to hear is
more of the stinging, controversial jeremiad that
Belafonte has been laying down this year, red hot like
today's news.

He does not disappoint. At 79, the entertainer still
knows his audience. He may discomfit -- in fact, he
likes to discomfit -- but he never disappoints.

In January he led a delegation (Glover, Cornel West,
Bloods, Crips) to Venezuela, met with leftist president
Chavez for eight hours, and called President Bush "the
greatest terrorist in the world." Back in the United
States, he referred to "the Gestapo of Homeland
Security." A few years ago, he compared then-Secretary
of State Colin Powell to a slave who "was permitted to
come into the house of the master."

After each rhetorical detonation, he was duly
interrogated by the likes of Larry King and Wolf
Blitzer, asked if he wanted to take anything back.

Here at the lunch, speaking for 39 minutes without
notes, he takes nothing back.

"George W. Bush will not be in office forever, Mr.
Ambassador," Belafonte says, addressing Venezuelan
Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez. "It is hard to ask you and
the rest of the world to be patient with our brutality
. . . Be patient. America is awakening again."

A moment later, working his way into the rhetorical red
zone, he adds, "I knew what I was saying when I
referred to George W. Bush as the greatest terrorist in
the world." (Pause for rising applause and cheers.)
"And he has done nothing to try to improve his image."

Such talk has inspired some columnists and editorial
writers to suggest that Mr. Tally Mon needs to count
whether Belafonte is losing his bananas. Even some
allies on the left have wondered whether the old man is
going too far. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and
publisher of the Nation, recently called on people,
including Belafonte, to drop the Nazi analogies
because, she wrote, they demonize more than they
encourage debate.

But if anything, Belafonte is crazy like a fox, and his
critics have forgotten that the radical calypso singer
has always staked out political ground on the edge of
what the mainstream was ready to handle. The edge keeps
moving, and Belafonte keeps moving one step ahead of
it, afflicting the comfortable.

"It's always the same old thing," he says. "People feel
jeopardized if ruling power speaks. When I took up the
cause of Dr. King" -- as counselor, fundraiser and
bail-poster -- "I was a threat for my middle class and
white audience . . . White women ran through the house
singing my songs while cooking dinner, their husbands
came home and they danced all night to the calypso . .
. [Then] I support the 'upheaval.' Oops."

But now look how far the mainstream edge has moved:
"Dr. King is a holiday."

Belafonte spoke of this latest phase in the arc of his
life in several conversations over his two-day visit to
Washington for the foreign policy weekend of
TransAfrica Forum, the advocacy and policy group he
helped start three decades ago. He traveled alone from
New York, where he lives with his wife, Julie, in the
apartment building he bought after he was refused
admittance more than 40 years ago. Bald now, wearing a
hearing aid, he carries himself erect and resolute. His
famous voice used to be a whisper embracing a growl.
Now only the whisper remains -- a rich, expressive
whisper. He squints with the same fierceness of the
characters in his racially proud movies. But when the
familiar sun of his smile comes out, decades drop away
from his features.

"Sometimes I step into [controversy] to provoke it," he
says. "That gives me a chance to have rebuttal. That
has worked very well for me. I feel most of the
resistance is really from the progressive forces
themselves . . . They move very cautiously, whereas the
right jumps right in and lets me have it. They're
careless enough to give me a platform to get on and
speak. Thank you, Mr. Blitzer. Thank you, Larry King."

Belafonte is happy to accept another platform on which
to elaborate.

"Greatest terrorist"? He discounts the intentions of an
Osama bin Laden or a Bush, instead holding them to the
effects of their actions. "It's not just bin Laden and
the 3,000 people caught in the twin towers, it's the
thousands of Americans who are dying in the wars of
Afghanistan and Iraq. It's the tens of thousands
forever maimed and wounded, and the hundreds of
thousands of people in the region who are just called,
quietly and decently, 'collateral damage.' "

It was Martin LutherKing himself, of course, who once
said the U.S. government was "the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today."

"Gestapo of Homeland Security"? Belafonte focuses on
the warrantless surveillance, the chargeless detentions
and the alleged torture being carried out by the United
States.

Belafonte is in the back seat of a car riding up to
Takoma Park. He is going to visit Luis Cardona, the
Montgomery County Youth Violence Prevention
Coordinator, and others involved in programs to counter
gangs and ease tensions "between the black and the
brown," as Belafonte says -- African Americans and
Latinos.

This is typical Belafonte, say those who know him.
Unlike many celebrities who offer checkbook support for
causes, he returns to the trenches. Belafonte knows
Cardona well -- Cardona was on the mission to
Venezuela. They met through work with Barrios Unidos,
the award-winning gang-prevention program out of Los
Angeles. Belafonte is more than casually interested in
the immigrant debate. He is the son of immigrants from
Jamaica, and his mother was undocumented.

One of the purposes of the trip to Venezuela -- lost in
the din over who's the greatest terrorist -- was to lay
groundwork for a trade cooperative between former gang
members in the United States and farmers in Venezuela.
Later on his visit to Washington, Belafonte meets
privately with Alvarez in the ambassador's residence to
further these plans.

Over the years, there has been a price to being Harry
Belafonte. That price is part of the bargain of living
out on that edge. He has learned so much about America
from the things that unsettle it.

In 1957, what was scary to some was the movie "Island
in the Sun," with Belafonte playing a dashing politico
who flirts with the rich blonde played by Joan
Fontaine. "You never had to fight stupidity and
prejudice," he tells her. "As long as you're looking
for something real, you're not lost." Southern theaters
balked at showing it but finally agreed under heavy
Hollywood studio pressure.

A few years later, the head of Revlon canceled a series
of television specials because Belafonte insisted on
having integrated acts in every episode. Meanwhile, J.
Edgar Hoover was keeping tabs because of Belafonte's
leftist organizing and association with King.

Along the way, Belafonte turned down potentially
career-making roles in "Lilies of the Field," "To Sir,
With Love," and others, because he considered the black
characters "neutered," with little sexuality or
humanity. Sidney Poitier, one of his best friends then
and now, became a star by accepting some of those
roles.

Belafonte sometimes has been too much for his friends:
In the mid-1980s, he quit the board of TransAfrica when
it wanted to accept Bill Cosby as a board member. Cosby
was allowing "The Cosby Show" to be broadcast in South
Africa during apartheid, and TransAfrica was leading
the fight for divestment and sanctions. Belafonte saw
hypocrisy in his own organization.

"I said, 'I'm out of here,' " he says.

But look how the edge moves: Apartheid is gone, Cosby
is not involved with TransAfrica, Belafonte is back on
the board, and he's receiving an award for lifetime
service.

He gave his last concert three years ago, though he
says he may go back in the studio this summer. A
documentary is being made of his life. He just shot a
film with Anthony Hopkins about Bobby Kennedy's
assassination that is due out later this year. He earns
as much as $20,000 per speaking engagement.

Some of those dried up this year. Kansas City Young
Audiences canceled his engagement to headline a
fundraiser in May because corporate and philanthropic
sponsors objected to his statements, says Harlan
Brownlee, executive director. He says his organization
could not afford to risk funding because 150,000
children served in arts programs would be the losers.

Belafonte disagrees: "The children are the losers, for
not having somebody stand up," he says.

In February he was disinvited from speaking at the
funeral of Coretta Scott King. The shock of that slap
is still reverberating in civil rights circles.
Belafonte says he thinks the Bush administration
applied pressure. Yesterday afternoon the King family
issued its first statement on the controversy, blaming
an unnamed volunteer for both inviting and disinviting
Belafonte without the family's knowledge. The family
apologized to "one of our father's strongest
supporters, and one of the giants of our freedom
struggle."

Looking back, Belafonte remembers a piece of advice he
got early on from his role model, the blacklisted Paul
Robeson.

"Get them to sing your song," Robeson told him one
night at the Village Vanguard in New York, "and they'll
want to know who you are."

"Sure enough, I woke up one day and the whole world was
singing 'Day-o,' " Belafonte says.

Now he's hoping for the edge to move again, another
lurch forward. Waiting for the mainstream to catch up
to Harry Belafonte, so that one more time the
controversial doesn't seem so anymore. 
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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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