I called Tony Bennett when a humanitarian crisis loomed. It was 2006 and herders, supported by the Sudanese government, were laying waste to farm villages in Darfur, murdering men and boys and committing heinous atrocities against women. At the time, Tony was in the midst of a remarkable career resurgence, recording duets with Sting and Barbra Streisand and Tim McGraw. But there was no mention of career on our call. “I’ll meet you in New York!” he said, joining Meryl Streep in a campaign I launched called AID DARFUR. He went on to headline two fundraisers for me.
Tony, who died last month at the age of 96, was always going to the aid of someone or other. His signature song might have been “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” but Tony never lost heart nor his sense of right and wrong. In one of the books Tony wrote he recounted something that happened when he was a young man serving in Europe in World War II. Before the Battle of the Bulge, he was castigated by his commanding Army officer and then transferred because he was seen dining with a Black friend from New York. The sting of that injustice never left him. It fueled much of his generation-spanning activism.
In 1965, Tony got a call from Harry Belafonte. State troopers in Alabama had attacked peaceful civil rights marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7 with tear gas, billy clubs and trampling horses. When Martin Luther King later announced a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Tony’s friend Harry Belafonte started rallying friends from Hollywood and New York. Tony soon flew in along with dozens of others.
The evening of March 24, Tony and his musician friends were told by state troopers that they could not use any local stage — not if white and Black people were going to perform together. The group was determined to cheer on King’s protesters, however.
So they performed on the top of 18 wooden caskets brought in by a Black-owned funeral home. This unsteady stage was a jerry-rigged affair set amid a soaked field filled with thousands of weary marchers. Tony performed “Just in Time,” which he later said, “seemed oddly appropriate.”
Tony Bennett won 20 Grammys, but unlike many musicians, he can also boast such a platinum record in civil rights.
Nancy Langer has worked for humanitarian causes on four continents, serving for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and other rights groups. Her column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Lima News editorial board or AIM Media, owner of The Lima News.
