© Reproduced courtesy the Toronto Star Syndicate

Transcription :

The United States today is experiencing an extraordinary effort by its Negro citizens, through nonviolent means, to win their civil rights. One significant aspect of the struggle is the growing part prominent Negroes in the arts are taking in declaring themselves actively on desegregation. This week, with all the eyes of the world turned to Birmingham, The Star interviewed leading Negro performers throughout the US. to get their views on Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and where the struggle will lead.

By MORRIS DUFF and BLAIK KIRBY
Star Staff Writers

"I will follow Martin Luther King Jr. right to the grave if it is necessary in the war for human dignity in Birmingham." Diahann Carrol said yesterday. Commenting by telephone from New York on the struggle waged by the Alabama city against segregation, the stage luminary of the Broadway hit "No Strings" told The Star: "If the only way to live in dignity as human beings is by dying, we must be ready to do so, all of us."

Miss Carrol was one of the more than 20 top name Negro performers in the arts interviewed yesterday for the their opinions on the situations in Birmingham and on the Negro demonstrations and activity for civil rights in the United States

The role of the Negro performer in race disputes was thrown into stark relief by the actions of Chicago based comedian Dick Gregory, who personally joined the marchers in Birmingham and was later jailed.

Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to crash the color barrier in major league baseball, and former heavy weight champion Floyd Patterson announced their intention this week to join Mr. King's nonviolence mass demonstration aimed at cracking segregation in the south.

Indications are, said singer and matinee idol Harry Belafonte, who is a close friend of Mr. King and who has actively supported and helped to plan the strategy of Birmingham, that they are the start of a flood.

Dizzy Gillespie, the famed jazz trumpeter, was east of town when an invitation came from Robinson and Patterson to a luncheon meeting to discuss the pilgrimage to Birmingham.

He said that the plan is to "insure that big names will be active in all future disputes. "There will be increasing number of prominent Negroes going - probably a wave of them."

Mr. Belafonte, who was deep in rehearsal throes for a new show when called by The Star, was unable to speak to The Star directly, but authorized a statement through his personal agent endorsing the policies of Dr. King. After the strategy for the Birmingham campaign had been worked out, he had served as host at a private meeting in New York at which its leaders explained their purpose to a number of leading citizens and obtained their financial and moral support.

Singer Eartha Kitt told The Star that when police dogs were loosed on the peaceful demonstrators, it became inevitable that prominent Negroes would take part in the anti-segregation demonstrations.

"When they did that, we felt that we just had to do something to help, If necessary, I would have gone to Birmingham too. But even if Birmingham integrates, it will be necessary, I'm afraid, to fight the same battle over again in other places."

Miss Kitt criticized government inactivity. "I don't see that President Kennedy has tried to do much. In England, when there was a race riot a member of parliament stood in the street and said that the law would be enforced. People responsible would be sent to jail, he said, and they were. They could do that in America too," said Langston Hughes, famed poet and playwright. "After all, they're affected by Jim Crow, too. I remem

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TORONTO DAILY STAR: Saturday, May 11, 1963

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ber when I was 8 or 9, in Lawrence, Kansas, we suddenly couldn't go to Saturday movies anymore. The only theatre in town posted a sign, `No colored people admitted.' If I'd known how to demonstrate in protest, I would have done so then."

Hughes, who lives in New York, said the demonstrations " are absolutely necessary if we're going to have any progress ... I've been writing about Negro problems for 40 years, and it's my belief that writing doesn't change things like Southern segregationist attitudes."

Most of those interviewed defended the use of young children in anti-segregation demonstrations. Said Langston Hughes, famed poet and playwright: "After all, they are affected by Jim Crow, too I remember when I was 8 or 9, in Lawrence, Kansas, we suddenly couldn't go to Saturday movies anymore. The only theatre in town posted a sign, 'No colored people admitted.' If I'd known how to protest, I would have done so then."

Hughes, who now lives in New York, said the demonstrations " are absolutely necessary if we're going to have any progress ... I've been writing about Negro problems for 40 years, and it's my belief that writing doesn't change things like Southern segregationist attitudes."

Mr. Hughes, 61, predicted far more participation in the demonstrations by Negroes from the North. A similar prediction was made by jazz drummer Max Roach, who said there will be pilgrimages to scenes of dispute "that none of us can imagine."

Roach, husband of singer Abbey Lincoln, did not think that partial victory of the demonstrators in Birmingham was going to make things easier elsewhere in the South. "As far as the black man is concerned, we have this thing all over the United States."

From Los Angeles Ossie Davis, who wrote and starred in the Broadway show "?Purelly? Victorious," said that the victory achieved by the integration in Birmingham was a small but significant one. "But the fight is by no means over, and as it proceeds other stronger and more positive tactics will be needed."

Mr. Davis, who followed Sidney Poitier on Broadway as the star of "A Raisin In The Sun", praised Dr. King's ability to swing the top-name Negro entertainers into the struggle.

Leon Bibb, a folk singer now performing in Toronto and who went to Greenwood, Miss. with the demonstrators in April, said he has proposed a touring "Hootenany for Equality" which might start with famous artists, performing in Carnegie Hall to raise money to aid the Birmingham cause.

"Any Negro in a leadership role has to do something," he said, "or he will have disavowed his leadership." Mr. Bibb emphasized that, no matter what happens, there will be no violence by the Negroes.

Not all those The Star talked to were in agreement with Dick Gregory's action in going to Birmingham and taking part in the demonstrations.

Said fellow comedian Nipsey Russell: "The law, the constitution, guarantees things like the right to vote, and the Negro people in Alabama and Mississippi are being denied these rights. It is not the job of the Negro people to take action to preserve these rights. It is an indictment against the federal government that we should have to do it."

"If I were to decide that I would not allow red-haired people over 5'2" to walk on my side of the street, and I pushed all such people off into the gutter, would the redheads have to unite to have their rights protected. No, the police and the law are there to do that."

"The people of Birmingham don't need me, or Dick Gregory, or Nat "King" Cole, or Sammy Davis, Jr. They need only one man, and that's Martin Luther King. It's the six-year-olds who are going to jail who are doing the job."

Ralph Ellison, novelist ("The Invisible Man") and essayist, say "the outcome of the struggle in the South rests in the hands of those who have the power of violence in their hands. And that is not the Negroes."

From his home in New York city, he said he "fully approves of the work of Rev. Martin Luther King" and that he had marched again and would march again, but that during the Birmingham movement he had been kept at home because of his duties as writer in residence at Rutgers university.

"But," he continued, "I hope the marches continue. And not only in the South. But I hope they'll be carried on into the North, until the day comes when my people have their full freedom."

Adele Addison, the concert soprano, finds the non-violent protest movement in Birmingham "far too long in coming".

Speaking from Ann Arbor, Mich., where she is appearing in the May Festival of Music, she said: "Non-violent protest has always been part of my faith."

"It's terribly important that the battle be won. But it is more important how it is won. It must be done with honour. And also a great deal of love."

The Star was unable to reach Sammy Davis Jr. who was in England, but here was what Nat "King" Cole, contacted in Los Angeles, had to say:

"If I truly believed that my appearance in the South would help cure - or even arrest - the cancerous evil of prejudice. I wouldn't hesitate to go. I don't happen to believe in this."

Mr. Cole said he felt his greatest contribution could be to lend his talent and name to fund-raising in aid of the heroic people in the civil rights fight "and generally supporting in a specific financial way the work of Martin Luther King Jr."

Bandleader Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, said he was thinking of getting some engagements canceled so he could give benefits to raise money for the anti-segregation movement.

Speaking from Berkeley, Calif., where he'd just arrived, Louis said, "My heart's with Martin Luther King and I hope and pray it will all end soon."

To Jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus, the use of violence against the demonstrators is conformation that the Negro cannot hope to win the battle for civil rights. He said:

"I believe the white man is going to do in this country what Hitler did to the Jew. The white man really hates. He's the master of hate. That's why I want to leave this country. Why, I can't even enjoy the TV programs - they're all white."

"I wouldn't want a white man to marry my daughter," said Mingus. "I don't mind his not wanting to see me. I don't want to see him either."

A doubt that non-violence will work as a way of winning the anti-segregation battle was expressed by New York poet Leroi Jones, even though he supports the policy Negro leaders are following in Alabama. "I couldn't control myself and bow down when I was ordered to pray and remain submissive when I was attacked."

Oscar Peterson, award-winning Canadian Jazz pianist who operates the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto, and who is now appearing in San Francisco, doubts that Dick Gregory's Birmingham trip had done much good.

"It's the people of the South who (sic) doing it," he said, "I think all they need is the active citizenry crying for their rights. If Mr. Gregory had been harmed, it could have set off something very serious. The bravest man of all, really, is Rev. Martin Luther King. He has risked his life not once, but countless times."

"Winning in Birmingham will, if anything, cause the white diehards to tighten up on concessions which had already been made in other areas of the South."

Canadian born stage director ("Raisin in the Sun") Lloyd Richards sees the non-violent protest movement of Rev. Martin Luther King as "the forefront of the most important struggle in the 20th century."

"It's the responsibility of every person in North America to see that freedom is extended to all Americans," he said in a telephone interview from New York city.

As for the difference in attitude taken to the struggle by the Black Muslims and Mr. King, he said, "my beliefs are more along the line of Rev. Martin Luther King's, but they all are facing the same problems and I don't feel it is up to me to say which is the best way to go about it."

Folk singer and musical comedy writer Oscar Brown, Jr. sees the non-violent protest movement as a demonstration by a large number of human beings that there is another way to solve bitter problems than by resorting to war and violence.

Dancer Katherine Dunham, speaking from New York, called on the U.S. government to make certain that the bargain reached in Birmingham is kept.

"If I'd been down there, I can tell you one thing," singer Josh White said from Philadelphia. "I'd have been dead by now."

White had intended to go down to Birmingham, but was hospitalized by a nervous disorder that for a time paralyzed his right side.

"In the case any further disorders," he said. " I'll certainly be down. You can bet on it."

Joe Glazer, a New York booking agent for many Negro performers, including Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Gillespie, Pearl Bailey, Sarah Vaughn, Dorethy Dandridge, Carmen MacRae, Dinah Washington, and Duke Ellington, forecast many of his clients would be going where the action is.

"I wanted to go myself with Dick Gregory to Mississippi," said Glazer, who's white. "Why, I gave him $20,000 to charter two planes to take food to those people. All of my people feel the way I do, and you can quote them as saying so. It's a disgrace, an outrage, a shame."

Like many of those interviewed, bandleader and composer Duke Ellington was horrified by the use of dogs against the demonstrators in Birmingham.

"The picture of those dogs and children is what I can't get out of my mind. The damage to America's reputation is done and I don't know how they'll undo it."

Bill Kenny, in 1937 the original Inkspot and now working out of Vancouver, thinks the Birmingham troubles "have done a great deal of good."

Said Kenny: "The rest of the world, looking at what happened in Alabama, will stop and think: "If this can happen in what they call the greatest democracy in the world, it could happen to us."

Geoffrey Holder, noted West Indian Negro dancer, admitted he " doesn't like what's going on" in the South, but "I don't like to mix politics".

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