That week, I knew I had been witness to a great event, though in time it became less clear whether it was the start of something or the end. You simply didn’t hear this kind of thing in those days, not on network TV. Harry Belafonte: Was he not Negro manhood at its finest? Was he not the perfect hybrid of popular culture and political conscience? It was the air of principle, of moral certitude, of engagement-not to mention those teeth, those cheekbones. “If something happens to me, maybe something good will come of it.” Enormous applause burst forth from the studio audience, and my eyes misted over. King explained that he’d reconciled himself to the danger he faced. “Do you fear for your life?” Belafonte asked King, abruptly striking a sombre note. And my father snapped, “I told you he was a Communist.”

“Go ahead, brother!” I shouted: Johnny Carson was never like this. “Then someone is lying to the American people,” Belafonte declared, in a voice that was half silk, half outrage.īack in Piedmont, I rose from my seat. He pointed out that poverty among blacks, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and Appalachian whites had reached “Depression levels.” “The time has come to bring to bear the power of the nonviolent direct-action movement on the basic economic conditions that we face all over the country,” he said, in his rich, rolling baritone. King, looking tired and a little heavy, announced that he was shifting his emphasis from strictly racial issues.

“What do you have in store for us this summer?” Belafonte asked him, flashing a provocative smile: white folks were still reeling from the riots that had come with the previous year’s long hot summer. On the second evening, Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged from behind the curtain. Who had ever seen so many famous black folks (Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, Wilt Chamberlain, for starters) on the “Tonight Show”? So it was in that spirit-vindication on my part, mistrust on his-that my father and I sat together on our rust-red brocatelle sofa in front of the television set. By now, I knew I had the moral high ground, a fact I determined by a rough head count of the celebrities who had weighed in on my side. This was the year my father and I bonded over the Vietnam War-or, anyway, over our ongoing arguments on the subject, the point being that it gave us something to talk about. 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. I was a high-school student, growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia, a partly segregated hamlet in the Allegheny Mountains, and television was the only thing that connected any of us there with the larger world. For one week in February of 1968, something strange happened to the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson: it became the “Tonight Show” with Harry Belafonte.

Forbid Me by M. Robinson