When explaining the roots of his civil rights efforts, Tony Bennett often recounted his time in the Army. He brought a black soldier as a guest to Thanksgiving dinner, which prompted him to be severely reprimanded and demoted.
It was 1945, three years before segregation in the U.S. military was abolished. Shortly after turning 18, Bennett was drafted into World War II and ran into a high school friend and fellow soldier in occupied Germany. In his 1998 autobiography, Bennett recalled taking his friend Frank Smith to a holiday meal at a white soldier’s diner, where an angry police officer interrupted them.
“In fact, it is more acceptable to be friendly with the Germans than to be friendly with the same black American soldiers!” Bennett recalls in the book. “Good life.”
Ms. Bennett recalled that at that moment the officer took out a razor blade and cut the body stripes out of the uniform, spat on it and threw it to the floor. He was then tasked with exhuming soldiers’ bodies in mass graves so that they could be reburied with more dignity.
In his autobiography, Bennett recalled, “For a while, the whole affair made me feel disgusted with humanity.”
It was a pivotal moment for the young singer, who had just returned from the war and was focused on building a career in music. Twenty years later, in his 1965, when fame took a whirlwind, Bennett took part in the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, performing the march along with other musicians such as Harry He Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Nina He Simon, and Joan Baez.
His death Friday at the age of 96 evokes memories of Bennett’s gentle amiability and charm as America’s songbook guru, but also reminds him of him as a staunch defender of civil rights.
Bennett’s career began in the 1950s and ’60s, and while participating in jazz circles that included such greats as Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington, he witnessed the blatant racism that permeated the American entertainment industry. For example, Bennett recalled, Cole could not sit in the dining room of the club where he was performing, and Ellington was not allowed to attend the top-paid hotel party with Bennett.
“I have never been politically inclined, but these things were beyond politics,” Bennett said in his autobiography. “Nat and Duke were geniuses, great people who gave the world some of the most beautiful music the world had ever heard, but they were still treated like second-class citizens.”
In 1965, Belafonte recalled in the book that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. asked him to join the march to Montgomery, explaining that he wanted an entertainer to help him get media attention. Bennett agreed, traveling with singer and bandleader Billy Eckstein. In his autobiography, he likened the hostility of the Germans to that of the white National Guard, and said the march was a reminder of fighting against Germany at the end of the war.
The day before the marchers arrived at the Alabama State Capitol, Bennett was among the performers at a rally in the field where the marchers had camped for the night, singing on a makeshift stage made of coffins and plywood.
When Bennett and Eckstein left the march, Viola LiuzzoA volunteer from Michigan drove them to the airport. She was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
in 2007 documentary Belafonte recalled Bennett that his friend brought “the spirit of World War II into our vision of America in the future”.
The singer’s commitment to this cause continued. According to Bennett’s 2011 biography, “All that you are” The singer also refused to perform in apartheid-era South Africa. Coretta Scott King said she remains committed to the King Center, an organization she founded after her husband’s assassination.In Atlanta, Bennett is in the spotlight International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.
In his later years, Bennett devoted much of his philanthropic work to arts education, establishing a public high school in Queens called the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts with Susan Benedetto, whom he married in 2007. non-profit Fund arts programming in schools in need.
Later in life, when discussing social justice, Bennett said: frequent To quote singer Ella Fitzgerald, who also participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march, she told him, “Tony, we’re all here.”
“All the hardships, the wars, the prejudices, and everything that divides us just melt away.” he told Vanity Fair 2016, “When we realized that we are all on one planet together and that every problem should have a solution.”
