The One — Count ’Em, One — Week When Late-Night TV Went to the Dark Side
By: David Hinckley
Tags: Late Night Tv, Martin Luther King, Tonight Show, Harry Belafonte, 1960s

Some years ago I was interviewing the singer Jerry Butler, and the conversation turned to the subtle ways in which black artists still faced a harder road than whites.

Besides the segregation of the music industry, which often pushed black artists into the “black” market rather than the larger mainstream “pop” market, Butler explained that black artists had less access to promotional platforms that could expose their music to wider audiences.

Specifically, he cited The Tonight Show.

No offense to its host, he added, that being the legendary Johnny Carson. Nor did Butler suggest the NBC network had a blacklist. So to speak. Butler saw it as more subtle than that.

“They want a show that seems relaxed and friendly,” Butler said. “So they book guests they think Carson will feel comfortable with. People in their circle. People they might play golf with.

“That’s not going to be me.”

The incredible whiteness of late-night television has been a topic of pointed conversation for decades, which lends considerable historical resonance to a new Peacock documentary called The Sit-In, which premieres Thursday on the streaming service.

Harry Belafonte today, talking about his “Tonight” week.

The Sit-In revisits the week of Feb. 5–9, 1968, when Carson went on vacation and the host’s chair was taken by Harry Belafonte.

The guest list was decidedly not the people with whom the NBC bookers were likely to play golf. It included Dr. Martin Luther King, Sen. Robert Kennedy, Nipsey Russell, Paul Newman, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll and more than a dozen others who shared some of Belafonte’s socio-political views in a timeslot that many Tonight viewers were used to seeing as a refuge from the news they heard the rest of the day.

By early 1968 Belafonte was not only a major player in the civil rights movement, but had spoken out against the Vietnam War. This hadn’t negated his reputation as an entertainer with broad crossover appeal, which is the reason he was offered the Tonight gig in the first place, and he says in The Sit-In that he was fine with making entertainment the priority.

At the same time, he says he accepted the offer only after securing the promise that “I be allowed to be myself.”

He had Carson’s blessing, he says, though naturally the guest list was subject to network approval. That probably helps explain why the list did not reach as far as radical voices like a Stokely Carmichael.

Nonetheless, the commentators here agree, Belafonte’s week marked a striking departure for a show that had been — and after Belafonte would continue to be — a soft landing for the day.

It’s only in the last few years, The Sit-In notes, that hosts like Stephen Colbert have given late-night a more overtly political tone. The Sit-In also notes that it would be more than 20 years before late-night got its first full-time black host, Arsenio Hall.

Interestingly, The Sit-In — which was directed by Yoruba Richen and executive-produced by Joy Reid of MSNBC — uses only select and often relatively brief clips from the Belafonte shows themselves. We see short snippets of music and a few questions and answers, mostly with the bigger names like King and Kennedy — both of whom would be murdered within the next four months.

The Sit-In spends more of its time framing the context of February 1968, the start of a year for which the term “contentious” only begins to capture the forces tearing at the fabric of the country.

Belafonte took over Tonight less than a week after the Tet Offensive had shocked more Americans into reassessing the Vietnam War, asking whether the government’s relentlessly optimistic assertions were true.

The Civil Rights movement was splitting into more open factions, putting enormous pressure on Dr. King over his strategy of non-violence and his launch of a Poor People’s Campaign designed to incorporate Latinos, Mexicans, Native Americans and poor whites as well as black folks.

King and Belafonte.

King talks about that with Belafonte. King also makes a couple of jokes, reflecting the fact that Belafonte, like Carson, was using Tonight as a forum in which public figures could relax and perhaps seem a bit more human than they did in their day jobs.

Purely as a host, from the fragmentary evidence here, Belafonte did okay. He had written out his questions and he asked them in an engaging, professional manner. He had a likable style that seemed to make guests feel comfortable talking with him.

He wasn’t Carson. He didn’t have that almost supernatural ease or the well-polished sense of timing.

He did, however, accomplish his goal, which was to open late-night, if only for a week, to people who would ordinarily not have been there.

In the history of late-night and talk television, Belafonte’s week could be seen as an intriguing footnote. It could also be seen, perhaps by someone like Jerry Butler, as a glimpse of what wasn’t.