Harry Belafonte

Are you ready? Yeah.

Oh, okay.

I'm asking you this question. You were born in 1927. I don't discuss that. [laughs] Okay. But could you tell us, please, how you grew up? Some stories from your social background and the early years.

I was born in 1927 in Harlem, in New York. My parents were West Indian immigrants that come to America like most immigrants who come to this country expecting to find a new dream fulfilled, expecting to find that they were going to be in the land of great opportunity and more freedom than they had known, but that was not the case.

My mother was very much undereducated. She was a domestic worker. My father was a seaman. He worked as a merchant seaman for an American fleet and British fleets. And I was born in probably one of the most remarkable little places on the face of the earth. Although it was in fact a ghetto, although in fact it was a place conditioned by segregation, it was not a fully integrated community.

It did have pockets of ethnic differences. There were certain groups who were Italians and groups who were Jewish and groups who were Irish. But it was a predominantly black community. And I grew up in that environment.

When you were a young man, America got into the war. Blacks fought for going integrated into the army. Would you agree that the war was an integration move for the black community in America? You were yourself a soldier, right?

The Second World War held great promises for America and for a lot of Americans. I think it held a great promise for a lot of people in the world. The idea of defeating fascism, defeating a movement that had as central to its philosophy the idea that one race was far superior than any other race. To have defeated that kind of philosophy, to defeat an army that was carrying out that kind of mission, was for us a great sense of victory and a great sense of hope. And many of us as black Americans had felt that with winning that war, democracy would have opened up its arms and become far more embracing of all of the peoples of the world.

But in the United States and a lot of other places, that was not the case. Our armed forces were segregated. We did not serve together as troops. There were black divisions and white divisions. In the United States Navy, in which I served, there were white divisions and black divisions. Of course, when you were on board a ship, it was very hard to segregate. But if you did service on land in your duties as a seaman, you did so in segregated units.

At the end of the Second World War, we thought that that would all change. But America was not willing to change the laws, was not willing to change the rules, not easily. And that was what gave rise to the civil rights movement. That's what gave rise to the rebellion by many citizens in this country against the laws of the country. And many of us worked very hard at changing those laws. We discovered that as a people of color, however, we were not alone.

Because the British, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, all those people who defined themselves as allies and the great fighters for democracy held great colonial land all over the globe. And when the war ended, they did not seek to put an end to colonial rule. They returned to business as usual. And in most places where there were colonial forces and the colonial order, the laws were also segregated. The laws were segregated in India, in Africa, in Asia, in certain places in the Caribbean where I grew up.

There were different lines for whites and for coloreds. And I think most of the peoples of the world who were caught in that condition rebelled against it. So then you had all of these wars of liberation throughout Africa, throughout Asia, which led us well into the end of the 20th century. Vietnam and with Indochina and with China becoming independent, well, that was well before. But most nations struggled as a result of what was started by the great conflict of the Second World War.

You began at Schomburg Center, as I heard yesterday. Could you tell us something about the role of music for you and for the black community in the American society?

Slavery produced a lot of miracles for the people who were enslaved. One has to understand the extreme cruelty of that period. I don't think we've ever fully understood how deeply cruel slavery was to the peoples who were the victims of that order. I think if one can recall the kind of misery many people in Europe experienced in the gas chambers and the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and the way in which people were regimented to a life of second-class citizenry, it would be a small view of what Africans experienced as slaves in America and throughout this hemisphere.

In order to survive, slaves had to become very clever. They had to create a lot of very significant outlets for expression. So that in order to document our history, the thing that most served us was in fact the use of music, because all of our history was recorded in the songs that we sang. Could you hold on just one moment for me?

Can you hear that noise out in the hall?

Well, we can hear it, but I don't know if it's picking up. Is it disturbing you?

The question was your beginning at Schomburg Center and the role of music in the question of integration through music.

The Schomburg Center is probably one of the most important institutions we have in America when it comes to black culture and black history. It is a place where they have gathered millions of documents and millions of pictures and tapes that attest to and describe the history of black people in America. It is a wonderful source for accurate facts of life.

The most important part of my experience with Schomburg was to be able to find documents and material that helped us understand more clearly what slaves went through and what their lives were like. And although there was not much opportunity to write and to document because slaves were not permitted to write, they were hardly permitted to even speak in large gatherings with each other because the slave masters were very afraid of rebellion.

And because they wanted to suppress rebellion, they suppressed speech. None of the slaves were educated. The only way slaves could document their experience and give us a chronicle of their lives was through the music that was sung. And if you track the songs of black America from the earliest dawnings of slavery until about the turn of the 20th century, you'll find that most of what we know comes through the songs as we have studied them for over two, three hundred years.

And in the anthology that I did for BMG, "The Long Road to Freedom", we used the Schomburg.

Also used the Library of Congress in the United States Congress, a center of information on all that goes on in America. And we used those resources

Do you think this music changed during the process of integration, the social change of generations as a reflection found in music? Is there a connection between the social change of the black community and the change in the styles of music?

The changes in society can be defined through the music, because as each change took place, music changed, culture changed. The earliest days of slavery and the plantation songs, slaves just barely learning how to speak English sang songs that were mostly religious,

because the master would not let them speak in their indigenous language.

They were taught the Christian faith, and they were taught the tenets of Christianity, and they were taught to read the Bible, or to study the Bible, or to be taught the Bible. They didn't read the Bible. And they had slave ministers who went all around the different plantations instructing slaves. As a matter of fact, using Christianity to tell slaves that they must never rebel against their masters, no matter how cruel or how evil they were, that they would be rewarded for their docile behavior with the kingdom of heaven. And so the earliest documents we have of slaves having a discourse of any kind was the slave songs that came out of the earliest tenets of singing church music. And many of the church songs reflected the hopes and the aspirations of slaves. As society grew, as cotton became king, as more slaves began to fill the land, more Europeans came to direct slaves and to direct the commerce of the cotton empire and slavery. That integration moved slaves from plantations to different occupations.

Where they were just harvesting the cotton, they now became, they had to pack the cotton, they had to transport the cotton, they had to load the cotton from the warehouses onto the ships. And as they went through this process and they began to meet different people, their expression changed and the content of their songs changed. As they became more rebellious, their songs changed because in the songs, the songs reflected the rebellion against their condition. Anti-slave songs. Songs that stimulated rebellion among the slaves.

As the slaves began to rebel and move out of slavery and fight against the slave plantations, their songs began to encourage that rebellion. "Go Down Moses" is a very famous song. A song about a woman by the name of Harriet Tubman who was considered one of the greatest abolitionists. She directed what they called the Underground Railroad movement, which was to move slaves by night out of the South into the free North. And they used songs to communicate from plantation to plantation to direct slaves on which ways to go and what to look out for in relationship to the slave drivers or the paddy wagons, as we call them.

When the Civil War came and slaves began to participate in that war, they began to develop songs of the military. And as black units serving in the Union Army fighting against the Confederacy, we have many songs that the soldiers sang and that were written about the brave things and the courageous things that they did and what they expected at the end of that war. We have what we call the antebellum period, when they began to sing the songs of freedom and the songs of hope for the future.

And they used the church music that they knew so well to sing to a great hope of the democratic future that slaves expected. And as slaves left the South and moved north into the industrial zones of America, the culture changed then too. The earliest beginnings of jazz, coming out of New Orleans, going into Kansas City, going into Chicago, going into Baltimore, even out of Memphis. All the jazz period began, and that music became freer and more open and more complex because now it began to integrate Eurocentric culture with African culture and slave culture, which gave us what is now agreed to by all, the really only pure American art form, is considered to be jazz.

Do you think rap is a rebellion, too? Rap.

The hip-hop culture.

I've always believed that art, in its best service, is art that stimulates rebellion. See, it's that drilling again. You're picking it up, right? You can hear it drilling, right? Let me take care of this. It needs a bigger authority than I've called upon.

I was on a roll, too, just getting warmed up here. What the hell were we talking about?

Ready? I had a great mentor as a young boy and a young man growing up, who was a great artist by the name of Paul Robeson. And Paul Robeson once said to me that the responsibility of art is not just to show life as it is, but to inspire and show life as it should be.

I think that concept necessarily addresses the fact that art must be a stimulus for rebellion. And I think that traditionally, we've always found that artists and culture is at the cutting edge of when people are in need of change. The music of the slaves certainly stimulated rebellion and gave inspiration to people who were living lives of enormous cruelty.

And I think in our tradition, we've always found that music is almost the forerunner and the prophecy of what is to come because it stimulates people towards a higher order of living, towards a more decent social set of conditions and circumstance. The most recent demonstration of that thought, of that concept is the hip-hop culture, rap music. When rap first came on the scene out of the Bronx in New York City, I would go to visit the young people with some regularity and watch this culture as it grew. And it was a magnificent culture.

They used rap music as a competitive way in which the young teenagers, rather than shooting and killing one another, they musically competed for which was the best group, the strongest group. And in that context, they talked about nonviolence. They talked about better treatment of women. They talked about high aspirations towards education and social freedom. And although people treated that culture in the beginning as a passing fancy, instead of being a passing fancy, the culture held.

And a lot of young people were attracted to it. And the more they were attracted to it, if you go back into the early music of Melle Mel and Afrika Bambaataa and the early captains of the hip-hop culture, all of their songs were replete with social information and political information that stimulated young people to change the way of life that they were experiencing. When the commercial world saw the passion of youth in the embrace of this music, they then took it over, and because of infusing that culture with so much money, they began to distort the basic concept of what that culture was.

And now it became a matter of just going after the gold rather than after the purification of the soul or the more loftier concept of changing the social environment. And then all of a sudden you woke up one day and rap music took off into a place of embracing violence, became, where everybody got dressed and dripping in gold chains and fancy cars and fancy women, and this for the moment became the culture. And not only was that the culture that was recorded, but because most of the companies that make that music also control television.

[coughs] Excuse me. Also control television. And they used television to depict the hip-hop culture in the gold-dripping, fancy women milieu. And for a long time, black communities have been in great struggle to try to change and get back to the roots of rap culture and lead it back to where it had originally begun. If you go to the other places in the world outside of America, where rap culture is beginning to take strong root, in the Caribbean, in South America, all through Africa, and in many, many places in Europe, even in Germany. We recently had a convention in New York, an international convention of rappers, and we were amazed to see the German rappers who came, the French rappers, rappers from China, rappers from Japan. It was astounding.

Rappers from Cuba, from Brazil, and all of the American rappers, and rappers from England. And it was just amazing to see the extent to which this culture had begun to span the earth, attract the imagination of the young. And most of the rappers that I know who are starting out today are rappers who write to a great social conscience, to social issues, and bring you social information. And I think that that culture is a vital part of the world youth.

What do in America, lawyers, the musicians, and Hollywood, Oscars and so.

you think about the fact that at the moment there is a suit claiming reparations for slavery? Is there a connection to, just in this moment, the black community seems to come up in the society, they begin to reflect upon economic damages and economic reparations for this?

The great struggle of civil rights was to level the playing field of life, to give everyone an equal opportunity to compete for the opportunities that society offers. It has been the experience of black Americans that having achieved many goals of the civil rights movement, they still had not fundamentally achieved social freedom and the right to social access.

It is true that we were able to change the laws. No longer do they have segregated buildings and segregated schools and segregated places in which to work and live. That's all changed by law. We now have the right to vote, which we did not have before. But just having the right to vote and just having the right to live in places where we could not live before or go to school in places we could not go to learn before did not open up economic freedom and give us an access to the economic riches of this country. And in this struggle, in order to find greater equality and greater access to resources to stimulate the growth of the society and of black people in America, it has now become very clear that we must look at ourselves through the economic prism of life.

What are we doing in terms of having money and resources to help us build a healthier society? Because we don't own factories, we don't own television, we don't own mineral mines, we don't own vast farms and agriculture. We have none of the relationship to the product of earth and the produce of earth that gives us a chance to become equal players. So in recent times, we have raised again the discussion of reparations, which is a desire to seek to get economic infusion that will help give us an equal opportunity to compete with others in the society.

There are some of us who feel that we must exercise great caution in how we look at the idea of reparations. There is something immoral about trying to quantify how you can pay the descendants of slavery, or the descendants of the slaves, for what was done to the slaves. Is there a dollar quotient? Is there a dollar amount? I mean, what, a billion dollars? A trillion dollars?

A hundred trillion dollars? How much money can you pay for that blight in history and for the cruelty? How can you make that immoral act now morally acceptable? I don't think it's possible. I don't even think the Jews who were able to petition and negotiate a reparation settlement with the German government, for instance, for what happened to Jews in the Second World War has really settled the question of what that villainy was about. As a matter of fact, many of us really believe that the Jews diminished their own interests, certainly morally, by putting a financial equation on how they could be paid for this cruelty that was experienced by so many. And I think blacks are now beginning to question, not the idea of reparations, because I think reparations are in fact in order and should be discussed.

What is reparations is what we're now trying to define. Is it money? Or is it saying to the society, you must create laws, you must create a social rhythm where all people are governed by rules that will make sure that those who have been disenfranchised become franchised so that, in other words, you must bring students and give them special opportunities to learn who are trapped in the abyss of ignorance because they have no access to schools. In the black communities today, we have very crowded classrooms, very tiny classrooms, too few teachers, and there is no sane rhythm to learning in the ghetto. Classes are usually used by teachers to try to govern conduct rather than to give education and to stimulate young people.

There are more young black men and women in the prisons of America today than there are in the universities of America. Why do so many young men and women turn to criminality? What do we do to change those social conditions? And here's where I think we have to look at the application of reparations to change the rules. And give us a change of rules to go out and learn, to become educated, to have access to the greater truth. And we will earn the money. We will help to, we will pay for ourselves.

But I think we make a great mistake if we say, give us $50 billion. So what happens after we spend the $50 billion? Or what happens if we invest the $50 billion in a building? So what? Someone somewhere will feel, well, we paid them. We owe them nothing anymore. Well, that would be an unfortunate conclusion. So I think the issue of reparations is a healthy issue, but I think how we conclude its destiny is very, very important.

Okay, that's it.

That's it?

Yeah, that's it.

With all that noise?

I've always believed in art and culture as the most powerful weapon of society. I believe that it is in art we understand with some clarity the true definitions of a lot in history. You know, they often say that history is interpreted by the victor. He who conquers interprets history. We have very rarely heard history interpreted through the voice of the conquered, those who have another dimension and another point of view. And sometimes when you look to find where is the balance and where is the truth to a thought or a concept historically, when you go and you examine art and what artists have written in plays and songs, we sometimes see a greater glimmer of the truth of history than what historians have written and documented and put into the universities about what we study.

We're finding that very true now in a new re-examination of the school curriculum, of the text that teaches history about Africa, about Indians, about Asians. The Eurocentric definitions that have been given all along have left an awful lot of truth out of that history. And I think if you go back into the music and into the paintings and into the early poets and what they wrote about, and you look at that coming from the conquered and those who were the underclass, you see a much richer mix of what society was truly about.

Robeson once said to me, get them to sing your song, meaning the world. He said to me, get them, meaning the public, get them to sing your song, and they will want to know who you are. And if they want to know who you are, that will be your first opportunity to instruct them and to give them information that might lead people to a new thought about any subject of choice.

I've always felt that the use of my music helped bring a definition to the table of not only who I was personally as Harry Belafonte, but the constituency, the people, the culture, the race that I represent. And my condition would help people change their prejudices, change their view about what they may have thought black people and African-Americans were about. When I sing a song like: 'Day-O, Day-O, daylight come and me wan' go home.' 'Day, me say day, me say day, me say day, me say day, me say Day-O.' 'Daylight come and me wan' go home.' A lot of people delight in that song.

I watch tens of thousands of Germans sing it with me every night when I walk and I sing through Europe and Asia and I'm amazed at how popular that song is. But if you examine that song, it's not just a delightful ditty. It tells the story of a people who lived in a place where most people think life was easy and how charming and comfortable and how simple, and they love their sex, and they love to drink rum, and lay under the banana tree, and they just love the way they live.

we worked very hard in the sugarcane and the banana

They loved you and they loved your music in East Berlin especially. They saw you when you were there.

I love it.

You're rolling? Okay.

And, you know, these were the songs of the people that I grew up with. My people worked on the plantations of Jamaica, and they loaded those ships, and they were underpaid. And through the music of the Caribbean, if you study what the singers and the calypsonians had to say, everything is in that music. And I really believe that the idea that a song could so capture the imagination of a person, that it could help change someone's view of a people and an entire culture, was always, to me, a great sense of power, a great sense of being able to use that kind of instruction to do good things and to make positive contributions to society. And I think that most of the art that I respect, most of the art that stimulates me, is art that does exactly that.

Now, who makes up this arena? It's a vast, vast history that we've had. Shakespeare was a great social voice. Tolstoy was a great social voice. Bertolt Brecht was a great social voice. Beethoven was a great social voice. You can go on and on. Picasso was a great social voice. The content of the work that all these men and women did carried forth instruction and thoughts and reflections on life. A life that made people awaken to new thoughts and new ideas and new possibilities.

And in that context, I think, in particular, many black Americans have seen art as the instrument through which we are able to tell the true story of our journey. And to be an artist that way, to use art to show life not just as it is, but to show life as it could be, or should be, is I think the best use of self.