Harry Belafonte: “Barack Obama is only a promise”

Les Payne

10/15/08

Iconic entertainer Harry Belafonte, who served as liaison between the civil rights movement of the 60’s and the Kennedy administration, assessed Barack Obama’s run for the White House as a fulfillment—albeit a troubling one—of Martin Luther King’s prophesy about racial integration.

This stunning view of the civil rights leader was uttered to a small group of confidants at Belafonte’s home a few days before King’s fatal trip to Memphis, where he was assassinated on April 4, 1968. “King was most distracted,” Belafonte said, “and filled with melancholy. I asked him, ‘Martin, what’s the matter?’

“He said, ‘you know we’ve come a long ways in this struggle and we’ve had many victories. We’re going to get the right to vote. We’re going to change the laws of segregation. In this mission of integration is where I sit in my most troubled moments, because I have come to understand that….

‘We are integrating into a burning house.’”

The congregation gasped as one at Belafonte’s account of King’s assessment. “”That remark got from this little audience the same response that you have just given me…nonplussed by that observation. After a pause, I said, ‘Dr. King, if that be your belief, what role do we play in the face of that fact?’

“He said, ‘We’re just going to have to become firemen.” Applause thundered through the congregants brought to their feet. “Once again,” Belafonte continued, “I didn’t understand the full measure of that prophesy, that observation: ‘the integrating into a burning house.’

“And now, standing here on this Sunday in this church, at this time at the dawning of the 21st Century, look at what is happening in America and the world and you will understand Dr. King’s prophesy(ing).

“We are integrating into a burning house. All things are in collapse. And since we will not burn with the house; we have to become firemen.” The famed, entertainer-humanitarian hitched the possibility of an Obama administration to the civil rights movement as well as to the likelihood of America becoming more civil at home and more neighborly abroad.

“Barack Obama is only a promise,” Belafonte told the crowd—and by extension the entire country--“we are the fulfillment of that promise.”