Opinion: When Martin Luther King Jr. needed funds for Project Confrontation in Birmingham in 1963, Harry Belafonte made it happen
I never met Harry Belafonte but for the last three years I’ve thought about him every day.
The protests were days from launching in Birmingham and King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference needed to finance the campaign. The SCLC was broke and Bull Connor, running Birmingham’s violent police force, had repelled decades’ worth of attempts to integrate the city. In other words, before the SCLC gambled lives going up against Connor and Birmingham this time, it had to figure out how to pay for Project C.King called Belafonte and asked if Harry would stage a fundraiser.
There was James Wechsler, the editor in chief of the liberal New York Post. Hugh Morrow, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s top advisor. Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis, among Harry hated that. He was not “nice.” He was not “approachable.” He was instead deeply aware of the broad discrimination all Black Americans contended with — he had grown up in a New York more segregated than his forebears’ colonial Jamaica — and of the discrimination among Black people based on color. This obsession with complexion enraged Harry. “For Dad, it was about changingThat change started with Belafonte’s own choices. “I wasn’t an artist who’d become an activist,” Belafonte later wrote.
Belafonte effectively abandoned his film career for the civil rights movement. King turned to him when the SCLC needed money. Bobby Kennedy, then U.S. attorney general in his brother’s administration, called when he wanted to “reason” with King. So wasn’t it a dangerous folly to stage the largest civil rights campaign to date in Birmingham, someone asked? Well, Shuttlesworth said, “you have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.”
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