Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

White supremacy is terrorism.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

How stupid are these people?

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

People are weird.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

All hail the time of the bunny!

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

You are here: Home / Popular Culture / Respite Open Thread: When Johnny Carson Supported #BlackLivesMatter

Respite Open Thread: When Johnny Carson Supported #BlackLivesMatter

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“Hiding in plain sight”:

… While the Vietnam War was raging and civil unrest was convulsing American cities, TV talk show host Johnny Carson did something special: He stepped away from “The Tonight Show” perch for a week.

Then something even more special happened: Belafonte took over.

For five nights, the Black singer, actor and activist entertained white middle America with his cool wit and an astonishing array of guests — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Sidney Poitier, Robert F. Kennedy, Paul Newman, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Petula Clark, Bill Cosby, Diahann Carroll and Lena Horne, among others.

That fascinating week of late night is the subject of the new Peacock documentary “The Sit-In,” which airs Thursday and celebrates Belafonte’s strategic and profound mix of art and politics…

In addition to his high-powered guests, Belafonte showed home movies of his family water-skiing and boating — conscious efforts to connect with his white audience.

“He was showing us his life,” says Walsh. “It went a long way to kind of normalize Black middle class and Black upper middle class life.”

The impact of Belafonte’s cheekily so-called “sit-in” is hard to measure but many believe it had profound effect. “That was probably the most revolutionary move that mainstream television could have done at the time,” Questlove says in the documentary.

One person watching was a young Henry Louis Gates Jr. The literary scholar would later write in the New Yorker: “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’ve done my best to stay away from streaming services — hardly even watch Netflix, where we’re still happily paying for the DVD shipped to us — but I’ll admit this is really tempting me. The Washington Post TV critic liked it:

… Belafonte — a superstar singer, actor and civil rights activist — took the opportunity to bring on an extraordinary range of Black artists and newsmakers and their White allies, from Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The guest list for that week, from Feb. 5 to 9, goes on: Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, Indigenous folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, ventriloquist Aaron Williams and singer Freda Payne, among others.

Richen’s film is executive produced by MSNBC anchor Joy Reid and co-produced by Nation journalist Joan Walsh, who wrote a 2017 story for the Nation about the shows. The documentary interviews Belafonte, now 93, and several of the entertainers who appeared on the “Tonight Show” with him that week (Warwick confesses that she can’t remember what happened to her yesterday, much less in 1968, but seems delighted to hear she was a part of it), as well as present-day celebrities and culture writers about the impact Belafonte’s week had on American TV…

Fifteen of that week’s 25 guests were Black, according to Walsh’s story. Besides Kennedy, other White guests included Paul Newman, Petula Clark and the Smothers Brothers.

Belafonte was given a lot of freedom in booking guests, but when he got King (who so rarely was given access to network TV shows), NBC executives nervously asked if the show would get too serious. Belafonte largely ignored their worries. “It was a silly question,” he recalls. “We’ve got [King] here, what do you want him to do, sing a song?”…

There’s an… illuminating anecdote with this YouTube clip:

Reader Interactions

31Comments

  1. 1.

    Laura Too

    Wow! Thanks for this. So many thoughts going through my head right now, but mostly that I get so caught up in the fire hose of now that I forget about our history. The things we’ve overcome and the work still left to do. And the beauty amid the ugliness.

  2. 2.

    Laura Too

    I haven’t been around much, has anyone posted about the Princess Bride reunion tomorrow night that is a fundraiser for Wisconsin democrats? Also filed under something good.

  3. 3.

    raven

    I paid for the damn Peacock thing only to learn they are in a fight with Roku and I can’t get it. (No I don’t want to stream if from my iPad.)

  5. 5.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @raven:  I’ve been refusing to even stream the free content until they work this crap out with ROKU (same with HBO Max). The online streaming is terrible – it stops and starts for no reason (I 1g, so streaming is NEVER an issue.)

    For this though, I’ll see what I can do to watch because it sounds amazing.

  6. 6.

    Laura Too

    @TaMara (HFG): Thanks! I have been so excited for this. It’s been on the calendar since it was announced and we will have a small party with my niece and her husband who live upstairs. Trying to come up with a menu in case anyone has ideas to contribute. MLT?

  7. 7.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @TaMara (HFG):

    The online streaming is terrible – it stops and starts for no reason (I 1g, so streaming is NEVER an issue.)

    Huh, I thought that was just my internet connection. Peacock does that to me too on my Amazon Fire TV

  9. 9.

    Mike G

    During a taping of the show in March 1968, while singing a duet with Belafonte titled “On the Path of Glory”, an anti-war song that she had composed, Petula Clark innocently and naturally touched Belafonte’s arm toward the end of the song. Doyle Lott, a vice president from Chrysler, the show’s sponsor, was present at the taping. Lott objected to the “interracial touching” and feared the brief moment would offend Southern viewers — this at a time when racial conflict was a major issue in the U.S. Lott insisted they substitute a different take — one with Clark and Belafonte standing well away from each other. But Clark and her husband, Claude Wolff, the executive producer of the show, refused. They destroyed all the other takes of the song, and delivered the finished program to NBC with the touching segment as part of the show. Clark, who had ownership of the special, told NBC that the performance would be shown intact or she would not allow the special to be aired at all. Meanwhile, at Chrysler, by March 10, 1968, Doyle Lott was relieved of his responsibilities.

  10. 10.

    cain

    If there was one white actor to bring on that show during that week it would be Paul Newman. The man was a treasure. A true liberal.

    Wow to see King and a host of black luminaries – what an incredible week it must have been.

  14. 14.

    cain

    I’m sticking to only two streaming services – Amazon Prime Now and Netflix.

    Besides, I dont even turn my TV on for weeks at a time. Every time I pull up thinking I want to something I kinda shrug and think I rather watch a book. The wierd part is the kind of anxiety in thinking about watching it. Meh.

  15. 15.

    Starfish

    With the recent racial awareness and uprising, all the streaming services that were trending towards more Black content ran out to get some.

    We recently watched the Self-made, the mini-series about Madame C. J. Walker. The first episode was a little strange, but everything fell into place after that.

    We are also watching Lovecraft Country which takes H. P. Lovecraft’s work and throws it into a segregated US where we are cheering for everyone who is Black, and white people get killed left and right by Lovecraftian horrors.

  19. 19.

    Laura Too

    @TaMara (HFG): I don’t have your email and can’t find it on the site. Mine is laurabbey   @ gmail if you could send that it would be so cool. I will have my work cut out for me tomorrow.

  20. 20.

    TheOBP

    @cain: 

    Paul Newman was a great man. One of those people who took being talented and gorgeous and didn’t rest on that, but spent his whole life being good.

  21. 21.

    geg6

    @TheOBP:

    Everything about him was sexy and just good in every way.   The most beautiful man ever, IMHO.  Inside and out.  And those eyes, OMG!  And what an amazing damn actor. Just the best. My mother was mad for him.  And, weirdly enough, Joe Biden.

  26. 26.

    Nicole

    What a cool piece of television history! I had no idea. Harry Belafonte was my very first crush, when I was five.  My parents had his first Live at Carnegie Hall album, and I would look at the photos of him on the inside the cover all the time.  It’s a really, really good album, and spoiled me for other live recordings; I don’t know what magic the engineers did, but the balance between him and the orchestra and the audience is perfection.

    Very sad to hear little exists from his week hosting the Tonight Show.  At least the Smothers Brothers saved the performance that CBS cut from the airing when he was on their show:
    youtube.com/watch?v=QFE4N57ibUQ&t=16s

  27. 27.

    J R in WV

    @TheOBP:

    One of those people who took being talented and gorgeous and didn’t rest on that, but spent his whole life being good.

    Same for Harry Belafonte. Still a great man. I once worked with one of his daughters, she was sweet, skilled and hard working. Harry is 93 now!! Hope he’s still got his wits together, was a great performer and activist!

  31. 31.

    taumaturgo

    Do yourself a favor and watch the Social Dilemma on Netflix. Is a provocative and disturbing view presented by ex developers from Google, Twitter, Facebook, What’s app, Instagram, and others of the commercialization and detailed psychological manipulation built into these services. As I watched the show, in dawn on me why the Karens and MAGA types are so resilient in their beliefs. The answer is the constant affirmation they receive from these services -as well as Fox News – of their most like sites, without ever having access to counterbalance to their views. This inevitably leads to tribalism and it renders the tribes unable and unwilling to even agree on what the problem is. It is unhealthy not to mention unethical on a personal level to be manipulated without our explicit consent or remuneration and a real threat to democracy as we know it.

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