Singer, actor, social activist. For most of my life, Harry Belafonte has not only entertained me. He has enlightened and motivated me. I am quite proud to say that recently, in New York City, I participated on-camera in a documentary being shot about a week of television history Harry Belafonte made on NBC. It's a week I blogged about a few years ago. That blog post of mine was found and ready by Joan Walsh, a frequent contributor on MSNBC. Joan writes for The Nation and included me in her February 2017 article entitled "49 Years Ago, Harry Belafonte Hosted the Tonight Show -- and It Was Amazing." Belafonte hosted for the vacationing Johnny Carson. He had a top celebrity guest list that week -- Lena Horne, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Zero Mostel and Aretha Franklin appeared. Another one of his guests was his dear friend, Dr. Martin Luther King. They talked about serious social issues of the day and they even shared a few laughs.
Another guest was Senator Robert F. Kennedy. This was February 1968 and, tragically, both Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy would be dead six months later, each shot and killed by an assassin.
I remember that week of television from my high school years. It was extremely significant to me. When Johnny Carson died in 2005, it irritated me to see a white veteran entertainment reporter on NBC do an obituary segment on Carson and pretty much credit him with booking and conducting the interview of Dr. King. Wrong. I felt that some of our Black History had been whitewashed, Harry Belafonte was the host. Belafonte booked Dr. King against the wishes of white NBC executives who felt that Dr. King was too radical and his appearance would upset the sponsors. Too radical because he was demanding Civil Rights for African-Americans. Network execs didn't want to rattle sponsors who were opposed to that. Today we honor the memory of Dr. King with a federal holiday.
I am rarely asked to speak about how racial images motivated me to seek the career I did. I'm rarely asked about my youth in South Central L.A. and having grown up in the curfew area during the infamous Watts Riots of the mid 1960s. The local TV news images of Black people in our community during that uprising were, to me, imbalanced. They did not reflect people like my parents, our friends and neighbors on our block, my teachers at school and my classmates. I can't even recall seeing a Black reporter cover the story or TV nor can I recall Black residents being interviewed. On camera for the documentary, I talked about that plus the social/ and artistic relevance Harry Belafonte has had in my life from that week on NBC to his appearance in Spike Lee's outstanding Oscar-winning film, BLACKkKLANSMAN.
I talked about the hope Sen. Robert F. Kennedy gave us young American when he ran for president. He came into our Black and Mexican-American communities. I talked about being awed by his charisma when I saw him in person in South Central L.A. I talked my family's grief when he was shot two days after that, and I talked about the irony of being the only African American film critic in a private New York City screening room to see the 2006 movie, BOBBY. The film, directed and written by Emilio Estevez, focused on various people gathered in the Los Angeles hotel for a night during Bobby Kennedy's campaign that went from celebratory to suddenly tragic. Harry Belafonte had a role in the film.
As one young Black character in the movie talked about how Bobby Kennedy made him feel racially significant, I was seated amongst white film critics because the field of film critics on national TV and, in New York City, local TV was predominantly white male -- and had been for decades.
Joan Walsh is a producer on this documentary project. I am so thankful that she included me in her article in TheNation.com and that she asked me to be on camera in the documentary. The bigger picture in this look at a week of The TONIGHT Show is, of course, race and equal opportunities in America. What Belafonte did that week on NBC opened the door for people like Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg and yours truly.
Think about it. Harry Belafonte was host of the TONIGHT Show for one week in 1968. How many Black artists have hosted that show for a week since then? How many Black artists after Johnny Carson left have been hired as host? NBC, CBS, ABC … all have late night entertainment shows. How many have had a Black, Latinx or Asian-American host?
Harry Belafonte has been interviewed for the documentary. So was singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was one of his guests that week on NBC. The plan is that the completed documentary will play at the Sundance Film Festival.
For those who may never have seen my national talk show host work, work that was influenced by seeing Mr. Belafonte on NBC when I was a kid, here's a reel of my VH1 show from the late 1980s.
I was never, ever offered another national talk show host opportunity after my VH1 years. This, despite getting excellent reviews from The New York Times and other publications. Instead, I worked on news programs through the 1990s to 2000 where white producers either said to me, "I don't know if you have the skills to cover entertainment" or "Do you know anything about films?" One such place was WNBC. I had to constantly prove myself. This, I now know, had more to do with the lack of equal opportunities and was not about my skills.
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