[ The reality seized me that I had been playing much too small as
a writer, covering and commenting on society and its systems rather
than truly challenging them.]
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THE HARRY BELAFONTE SPEECH THAT CHANGED MY LIFE  
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Charles M. Blow
April 25, 2023
The New York Times
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_ The reality seized me that I had been playing much too small as a
writer, covering and commenting on society and its systems rather than
truly challenging them. _

Harry Belafonte in 2013, Damon Winter/The New York Times

 

In the summer of 2013, I participated in a daylong series of talks at
the Ford Foundation in Midtown Manhattan. The event, The Road Ahead
for Civil Rights: Courting Change, was meant to mark the
semicentennial of the civil rights movement.

My panel was in the morning, but I stayed for the lunch session
because Harry Belafonte was participating in it, along with the
activist Dolores Huerta. I met Belafonte once before, and I was in awe
of him. I didn’t know the Belafonte my parents knew, the young,
handsome calypso singer. I knew him as an elder statesman for Black
America, one whose now gravelly voice seemed to only deepen his
solemnity.

Belafonte, who was 86 at the time, did not disappoint. His words that
day would change my life. Dressed in a natty cream suit, he was so
eloquent and erudite — even poetic at times — that I craned my
neck to see if he was reading from a prepared text. But there were no
notes that I could see; we were witnessing the brilliance of Belafonte
in real time. His words burned with a fire that spared none.

Sitting in the dining room of the Ford Foundation — one of the
largest foundations in the world, a citadel of philanthropy —
Belafonte said, “I think that philanthropy is a big part of the
problem” because it fails to fund the real change makers. As he put
it, he hadn’t been sure that he would go to the event that day
because he was tired of begging philanthropies for money, only to have
them send back proposals to be adjusted for new criteria, the people
in boardrooms “telling the street how to shape language so we can
appeal to you for your meager generosity.”

He condemned Black leaders who he believed had been seduced and
silenced by the allure of self-import, saying, “The more they threw
money at our leaders, the more they gave them electoral power, the
more they gave them Black caucuses and progressive caucuses and they
could sit in these tiny rooms and dance to their own melody, they
completely lost sight of what was going on down below in the
communities.”

As Belafonte said, “We’ve become a shadow of need rather than a
vision of power.”

He chastised Black leaders for the cessation of pressure on the
political establishment after the initial successes of the civil
rights movement, saying: “We surrendered to greed. We surrendered to
our hedonist joys. We destroyed the civil rights movement. Looking at
the great harvest of achievements we had, all the young men and women
of our communities ran off to the feast of Wall Street and big
business and opportunity. And in that distraction, they left the field
fallow.”

He even took time to comment on hip-hop. He liked its street herald
beginning but believed that it had become corrupted by corporate
greed. “Wall Street heard the jingle, then the merchants stepped in
and began to adorn this culture with all the distractions that
ultimately took the culture over,” he said.

His assessment of President Barack Obama, then in his second term, was
harsh and unyielding. He said that Obama had been “a cause for hope,
a cause for opportunity and possibilities, and we, I think, endowed
that moment with more than the moment was willing to yield.”

He said he didn’t believe that the president saw “his governance
in the way that we would like him to see it.” Belafonte continued,
“I think the one essential ingredient missing in Mr. Obama’s
machine of thought is that he has suffocated radical thinking.”

Here, I diverged. It wasn’t that Obama himself had smothered or
suppressed radical thinking but rather that his presence, for society
at large, had sucked much of the air out of the room when it came to
the discussion of racial issues. That dynamic began to change in 2012
when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman and after Zimmerman
was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges just days before
Belafonte spoke. That acquittal and the Black Lives Matter movement
that it produced would change Obama and his presidency, including
being the genesis for one of Obama’s enduring legacies: the My
Brother’s Keeper Alliance.

But the point about the dampening of radical thought was woven
throughout Belafonte’s talk, and it was the part I remembered most.
“Where are the radical thinkers?” he demanded.

He explained that at that stage in his life, he spent most of his time
“encouraging young people to be more rebellious, to be more angry,
to be more aggressive in making those who are comfortable with our
oppression uncomfortable.”

It was a warm July day, so after that session, I decided to walk back
to The Times’s offices, and as I did, Belafonte’s question kept
repeating in my head. The reality seized me that I had been playing
much too small as a writer, covering and commenting on society and its
systems rather than truly challenging them. I was at peril of being
serenaded to sleep by professional vanities. I was squandering an
opportunity and a responsibility.

Belafonte’s question lived with me henceforth and changed what I
wrote and how I wrote it, and a few years ago, it spurred me to write
my most recent book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power
Manifesto.” It was the thesis of that book, reversing the Great
Migration to consolidate Black power in a few Southern states, that
prompted my own move to Atlanta.

I’ve written several columns that mentioned Belafonte, and he
invariably called me afterward. I wrote an appreciation
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the remarkable lives of him and his best friend, Sidney Poitier,
around their 90th birthdays. (They were born a week apart.) A portion
of my book that was excerpted in The Times included Belafonte’s
inspiration. And I wrote a column
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year on Poitier’s death.

Each time, Belafonte expressed his thanks. As I write this, I only
hope that I was clear to him in response that I was the one who was
thankful. That he had helped me clarify my thinking and my mission at
a time when I was at risk of treating them as trifles.

 

* Harry Belafonte
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* radical thought
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* Black writers
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