7 ms·

Less than a year after the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision by the US Supreme Court, Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark made history when Clark touched Belafo

Less than a year after the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision by the US Supreme Court, Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark made history when Clark touched Belafonte’s arm on US primetime TV: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/harry-belafonte-petula-clark-1968-civil-rights-arm-touch-national-commotion https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/harry-belafonte...

mkmk 3y ago
https://archive.is/JS8zn https://archive.is/JS8zn
Larrikin 3y ago
It's not crazy that such blatant racism occurred in the late sixties, it's crazy that people pretend all the racists and the way they thought just suddenly disappeared. Lots of those people are still alive. My grandma and mom both grew up in a segregated south. Even as an elementary school kid, the way the civil rights movement was taught made it unbelievable that my mom was a kid watching MLK on TV. it's probably not a coincidence that some of those people are voting in the oldest median age congress we have ever had.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  I'm older than median around here but still firmly working age. A black man was lynched in my hometown during my lifetime. There was no trial. One of the things most consistently infuriating about discussions of american policy on HN is how firmly committed we are overall to not reckoning with this. This is very recent history, they didn't just admit defeat or become wholesome ex-segregationists for the most part. The policies continue to have effects, and the intergenerational nature of wealth imbalance means even if they didn't we'd still expect to see consequences into the present. I jokingly refer to the way the civil rights era is taught to elementary school children as "and then the last racist killed MLK." I don't think that's necessarily even an inappropriate way to first bring it up with young children. But I wish people here expected more of themselves.
  - steve76 3y ago
    [dead]
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    It is not only that people even here on HN believe that discrimination of black people doesn't happen anymore, but worse there is a vocal group that thinks that white men are now the major victims. They quite literally state that white men (mainly if they receive pushback for racist/mysoginist statements) have it as bad as black people in the 60s.
    - cgio 3y ago
      As an external observer of American news, I don’t find it surprising when race is increasingly stressed, occasionally in not directly relevant context. E.g. there was a cnn headline recently along the lines of “Black and Latino man got in the car of White policeman and disappeared” with the races capitalised from source. No matter if the intention is against racism, the capitalisation and emphasis on races does not help from my vantage (and admittedly remote) viewpoint. Now if the story was definitely a racist one it would make sense but I did not get that in the context of the article itself. I think we all tend to victimise ourselves. The people in advantage will do so even more.
      - giraffe_lady 3y ago
        It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race." The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway. A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity. There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems. The capitalization thing is just part of an ongoing and unsettled reevaluation of what "races" even are, what their boundaries and prerogatives are, how they refer to themselves and how they are to be referred to, etc. I respect your discomfort with it and would point out that probably very few people are happy with the current state of this nomenclature, but that it's almost completely irrelevant to the problems themselves.
- mgkimsal 3y ago
  > Lots of those people are still alive. At least one of my still-alive parents (vaguely) remember "colored" water fountains in some areas. They were just young children, but witnessed a bit of that. Their parents certainly witnessed it. People in my immediate family, in their lifetime. Not history book stuff. They were there. It's crazy.
- rodgerd 3y ago
  A couple of them got together to make three US Supreme Court appointments recently.
- StanislavPetrov 3y ago
  >It's not crazy that such blatant racism occurred in the late sixties, it's crazy that people pretend all the racists and the way they thought just suddenly disappeared. It's equally crazy that many people pretend that racism in 2023 is remotely as bad as it was in the 60s. That isn't to say racism doesn't exist or that it isn't a lingering issue for society, but there is no doubt that for the last ~25 years we have been moving in the wrong direction as far as perceptions go. Can anyone honestly say that racism and discrimination is worse in 2023 than it was in 2001? But since the very effective propaganda narrative pushed by the media and the DC blob seeks to divide people along racial and identity lines (to avoid any sort of class solidarity), many believe that "racial relations" are at, by far, the lowest point in decades! https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
pupppet 3y ago
She touched his arm, seven months later Shatner kissed Nichelle Nichols.
tamaharbor 3y ago
Despite the racism, I have always wondered why a majority of US ‘Top 40 Hits’ were by black artists in the 1960s. Soul, R&B, and Motown were continually at the top of the charts.
- wintogreen74 3y ago
  and the rest of the hits by white performers were either "heavily inspired" or literal re-performed versions of black songs that wouldn't be played or broadcast by white-only radio stations and TV shows.
brobdingnagians 3y ago
"It has erroneously been described as the first instance on American television of physical contact between a black man and a white woman,[26] forgetting many previous instances, including Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on Alan Freed's live ABC T.V. show "The Big Beat" on July 19, 1957,[citation needed] Nancy Sinatra kissing Sammy Davis, Jr., on her 1967 Movin' with Nancy TV special,[27] and Louis Armstrong shaking hands with "What's My Line?" panelists Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis in 1953." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petula_Clark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petula_Clark
- hackernj 3y ago
  Thanks for the link. The first half of that paragraph is also interesting: “In 1968 NBC-TV invited Clark to host her own special in the US, and in doing so, she inadvertently made television history. While singing a duet of "On the Path of Glory", an antiwar song that she had composed, with guest Harry Belafonte, she took hold of his arm, to the dismay of a representative from the Chrysler Corporation (the show's sponsor), who feared that the moment would incur racial backlash from Southern viewers.[22] When he insisted that they substitute a different take, with Clark and Belafonte standing well away from each other, Clark and the executive producer of the show—her husband, Wolff—refused, destroyed all other takes of the song, and delivered the finished programme to NBC with the touch intact.[23][24] The Chrysler representative was terminated, and the programme aired on 8 April 1968, four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., with high ratings, critical acclaim,[25] and a Primetime Emmy nomination.”
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  This continued into the 90s apparently https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/former-teen-idol-says-she-160157085.html https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/former-teen-idol-says-she-16...

mkmk 3y ago

https://archive.is/JS8zn https://archive.is/JS8zn

Larrikin 3y ago

It's not crazy that such blatant racism occurred in the late sixties, it's crazy that people pretend all the racists and the way they thought just suddenly disappeared. Lots of those people are still alive. My grandma and mom both grew up in a segregated south. Even as an elementary school kid, the way the civil rights movement was taught made it unbelievable that my mom was a kid watching MLK on TV. it's probably not a coincidence that some of those people are voting in the oldest median age congress we have ever had.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
I'm older than median around here but still firmly working age. A black man was lynched in my hometown during my lifetime. There was no trial. One of the things most consistently infuriating about discussions of american policy on HN is how firmly committed we are overall to not reckoning with this. This is very recent history, they didn't just admit defeat or become wholesome ex-segregationists for the most part. The policies continue to have effects, and the intergenerational nature of wealth imbalance means even if they didn't we'd still expect to see consequences into the present. I jokingly refer to the way the civil rights era is taught to elementary school children as "and then the last racist killed MLK." I don't think that's necessarily even an inappropriate way to first bring it up with young children. But I wish people here expected more of themselves.
- steve76 3y ago
  [dead]
- cycomanic 3y ago
  It is not only that people even here on HN believe that discrimination of black people doesn't happen anymore, but worse there is a vocal group that thinks that white men are now the major victims. They quite literally state that white men (mainly if they receive pushback for racist/mysoginist statements) have it as bad as black people in the 60s.
  - cgio 3y ago
    As an external observer of American news, I don’t find it surprising when race is increasingly stressed, occasionally in not directly relevant context. E.g. there was a cnn headline recently along the lines of “Black and Latino man got in the car of White policeman and disappeared” with the races capitalised from source. No matter if the intention is against racism, the capitalisation and emphasis on races does not help from my vantage (and admittedly remote) viewpoint. Now if the story was definitely a racist one it would make sense but I did not get that in the context of the article itself. I think we all tend to victimise ourselves. The people in advantage will do so even more.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race." The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway. A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity. There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems. The capitalization thing is just part of an ongoing and unsettled reevaluation of what "races" even are, what their boundaries and prerogatives are, how they refer to themselves and how they are to be referred to, etc. I respect your discomfort with it and would point out that probably very few people are happy with the current state of this nomenclature, but that it's almost completely irrelevant to the problems themselves.
mgkimsal 3y ago
> Lots of those people are still alive. At least one of my still-alive parents (vaguely) remember "colored" water fountains in some areas. They were just young children, but witnessed a bit of that. Their parents certainly witnessed it. People in my immediate family, in their lifetime. Not history book stuff. They were there. It's crazy.
rodgerd 3y ago
A couple of them got together to make three US Supreme Court appointments recently.
StanislavPetrov 3y ago
>It's not crazy that such blatant racism occurred in the late sixties, it's crazy that people pretend all the racists and the way they thought just suddenly disappeared. It's equally crazy that many people pretend that racism in 2023 is remotely as bad as it was in the 60s. That isn't to say racism doesn't exist or that it isn't a lingering issue for society, but there is no doubt that for the last ~25 years we have been moving in the wrong direction as far as perceptions go. Can anyone honestly say that racism and discrimination is worse in 2023 than it was in 2001? But since the very effective propaganda narrative pushed by the media and the DC blob seeks to divide people along racial and identity lines (to avoid any sort of class solidarity), many believe that "racial relations" are at, by far, the lowest point in decades! https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx

pupppet 3y ago

She touched his arm, seven months later Shatner kissed Nichelle Nichols.

tamaharbor 3y ago

Despite the racism, I have always wondered why a majority of US ‘Top 40 Hits’ were by black artists in the 1960s. Soul, R&B, and Motown were continually at the top of the charts.

wintogreen74 3y ago
and the rest of the hits by white performers were either "heavily inspired" or literal re-performed versions of black songs that wouldn't be played or broadcast by white-only radio stations and TV shows.

brobdingnagians 3y ago

"It has erroneously been described as the first instance on American television of physical contact between a black man and a white woman,[26] forgetting many previous instances, including Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on Alan Freed's live ABC T.V. show "The Big Beat" on July 19, 1957,[citation needed] Nancy Sinatra kissing Sammy Davis, Jr., on her 1967 Movin' with Nancy TV special,[27] and Louis Armstrong shaking hands with "What's My Line?" panelists Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis in 1953." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petula_Clark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petula_Clark

hackernj 3y ago
Thanks for the link. The first half of that paragraph is also interesting: “In 1968 NBC-TV invited Clark to host her own special in the US, and in doing so, she inadvertently made television history. While singing a duet of "On the Path of Glory", an antiwar song that she had composed, with guest Harry Belafonte, she took hold of his arm, to the dismay of a representative from the Chrysler Corporation (the show's sponsor), who feared that the moment would incur racial backlash from Southern viewers.[22] When he insisted that they substitute a different take, with Clark and Belafonte standing well away from each other, Clark and the executive producer of the show—her husband, Wolff—refused, destroyed all other takes of the song, and delivered the finished programme to NBC with the touch intact.[23][24] The Chrysler representative was terminated, and the programme aired on 8 April 1968, four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., with high ratings, critical acclaim,[25] and a Primetime Emmy nomination.”
selimthegrim 3y ago
This continued into the 90s apparently https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/former-teen-idol-says-she-160157085.html https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/former-teen-idol-says-she-16...