The Sit-In

“You can cage the singer but not the song.” Harry Belafonte

A new documentary titled “The Sit-In” discusses a week in February 1968, when Harry Belafonte substituted for Johnny Carson (at Carson’s suggestion, a brave gesture) as host of the “Tonight Show.” Belafonte had made numerous guest appearances on the “Tonight Show,” as had black performers Sammy Davis, Jr., Bill Cosby, and many others. In the 1950s Jamaican-American Belafonte, born in Harlem in 1927, was known as the “King of Calypso” and had scored huge hits with “Matilda” and “The Banana Boat Song.” Growing up, Belafonte lived eight years with his grandmother in Kingston and knew the work songs well. In the early 1960s, at the height of the folk music craze on campuses and in coffeehouses, Belafonte was a bigger star than Bob Dylan. Handsome, articulate, and comfortable on camera, Belafonte not only hosted but secured the distinguished guests for five shows that combined entertainment and serious discussion of race-relations and world events. This was a time when the Tet Offensive was undermining American confidence in the Vietnam war and urban unrest was calling into question the efficacy of LBJ-style liberal reform. Among Belafonte’s “Tonight Show” guests were Dr. Martin Luther King, New York senator Robert F. Kennedy, comedians Nipsy Russell and Bill Cosby, singers Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, and Lena Horne, actors Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, and formerly blacklisted performer Leon Bibb, once good friends with Paul Robeson. Both Bibb and Belafonte had recorded “Rocks and Gravel,” a traditional black work song first recorded in 1928 by Peg Leg Howell. The chorus goes: “It takes rocks and gravel, baby, to make a solid road.” Sadly, copies of the Belafonte “Sit-In” shows do not exist, as in those days tapes were commonly reused.

Producer Norman Lear recalled: “Only Belafonte could have pulled that off. He was an ambassador in both directions – to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him.”Belafonte was a deeply committed civil rights activist who had attended marches and rallies and was friends with movement leaders, not only King but Julian Bond and other veterans of Freedom Summer. In fact, in 1964, after the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Belafonte and Sidney Poitier flew to Alabama with $76,000 to provide funding for the movement. The Nation’s Joan Walsh wrote: “Chased by armed Klansmen leaving the Greenwood airport, they almost didn’t make it our of the South alive.”

In 1968 blacks on TV was a rare event, other than in subservient positions, such as Jack Benny’s servant Rochester or “Amos and Andy.” Just three years before, Bill Cosby had broken TV’s racial glass ceiling by co-starring with Robert Culp in “I Spy.” Not until the Fall of 1969 would a black woman have a starring role – Diahann Carroll in “Julia.” My favorite that Fall season was “Room 222,” about a high school with a diverse student body and two black middle-class role models a male teacher (Lloyd Haynes) and female counselor (Denise Nicholas). Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., had just turned 18 when he learned that Belafonte would be sitting in for Johnny. He later recalled: “Night after night, my father and I stayed up late to watch a black man host the highest-rated show in its time slot – history in the making.”Belafonte, alive and kicking at 93, is still keeping the faith and contributing toward getting that arc to bend toward justice.

State Representative Vernon Smith (on left with Tracy Lewis and Charlie Brown) is one of the most principled people I know and a great champion of Gary and IU Northwest, where he is a professor of education.  Four years ago, he was at the Glen Theater, which he was renovating, when a 20-year-old armed robber named Keith Sanders forced him onto the floor and stole his wallet, keys, and cellphone.  Smith had almost no money with because, as he told Sanders, he’d given it to a woman in church who needed help. When a roofer arrived, Sanders stole possessions from him, too. Apprehended not long after the incident, Sanders has been in jail since 2017 awaiting trial, which finally took place in Lake Criminal Court in front of Judge Samuel Cappas.  Speaking directly to the defendant Vernon Smith told him he believed God has work for him to do, adding, as reported by Times correspondent Sarah Reese:

    Things do not happen by chance or happenchance.  Everything happens for a reason.  Some of us have to go to the school of hard knocks before we see the light.  It doesn’t matter where you came from, it matters where you’re going.

As part of a plea bargain, Judge Cappas sentenced Sanders (below) to eight years in prison but ordered that he receive credit for the three-plus years already served.  Sanders vowed to obtain a GED while incarcerated.