![]() 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |