by Mark Aspillera
Harry Belafonte speaks during a special reception at SFSU. (photo by Marvin J. Ramirez)
In a San Francisco State University theater filled with professors, academics, students and press, famous musicians, political activist Harry Belafonte addressed a group of original participants of the university’s 1968 student strike on Oct. 29, 2008.
The voice, detailing the events on October 2008, filled the room in slow paced, unhurried. Its softness required the audience to listen quietly, with great attention.
Belafonte, held in infamy for years not only for his title as the King of Calypso music, but as an unabashed and vocal man of the left. He described the strike as a “trigger” for protest around the country in 1968, pushing for the civil liberties and rights movement.
The Jamaican-American calypso musician forged his reputation as a leftist activist beginning in the 1960s. Belafonte was among celebrities like Sidney Poitier and Charlton Heston who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington D.C. Belafonte spoke of the time he met King as a young man for the first time.
“He was 24, I was 26,” he said.
King told him at the time that he believed “we are integrating into a burning house,” referring to blacks and America.
“I recognized he was prophesizing,” Belafonte said.
True to his reputation as a freethinker and speaker, Belafonte did not shy away from talking about present-day political issues during his address, in particular the year’s presidential election.
“What we’re really seeing, what are we really saying is that we are going to have great expectations on Obama when he is sitting in that chair,” he said, referring to the Oval Office.
Despite predicting Democrat Barack Obama as the victor of the presidential election, Belafonte had criticism to level towards both candidates, especially in what he saw as negligence towards issues of poverty.
“Of all the speeches I’ve heard, I have not heard anyone speak of the poor,” he said, adding “they are still holding poor people responsible for the crisis on Wall Street.”
Belafonte’s address was part of the events on the SFSU campus commemorating the 40th anniversary of the student strike. Hosting the event was SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies, a department created in 1969 by the agreements that ended the strike.
The four-day conference recognized an act of civil disobedience still surrounded by many dark clouds of controversy.
Critics of the strike say student strikers used a disproportionate amount of violence in attempts to achieve their goal of campus policies more receptive of student and faculty diversity. Tactics employed included the throwing of firebombs and setting of fires in the school library.
Among the strikers were controversial groups such as the Progressive Labor Party, a party underpinned by a Maoist political philosophy.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the San Francisco Police Department deployed horse-mounted officers, riot sticks and pepper and tear gas shells against concentrations of students in their attempts to quell the strike.
Accompanying Belafonte was actor, film director and fellow political activist Danny Glover, a former San Francisco State University student. Glover was a participant in the strike itself and a member of the Black Student Union at the time.
Glover told The Golden Gate [X]Press, SFSU’s campus newspaper, that the actions of strikers, including the 1969 resolution at end of five months, were historically significant, even though they “didn’t really know it at the time.”
(Marvin Ramirez contributed to this report.)
