page_title: Charlton Heston
section_title: Political activism
hierarchical_section_title: Charlton Heston / Political activism
caption_attribution_description: Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. [Author James Baldwin with actors Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston.], 08/28/1963
context_page_description: Charlton Heston was an American actor and political activist.
  As a Hollywood star, he appeared in almost 100 films over the course of 60 years. He played Moses in the epic film The Ten Commandments, for which he received his first nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama. He also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth, Secret of the Incas, Touch of Evil with Orson Welles, The Big Country, Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor, El Cid, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and Planet of the Apes.
  A supporter of the Civil Rights movement in his earlier years, Heston left the Democratic Party in 1971 to become a Republican, founding a conservative political action committee and supporting Ronald Reagan. Heston was a five-term president of the National Rifle Association, from 1998 to 2003. After announcing he had Alzheimer's disease in 2002, he retired from both acting and the NRA presidency.
context_section_description: Heston's political activism had four stages. In the first stage, 1955–61, he endorsed Democratic candidates for President, and signed on to petitions and liberal political causes. From 1961 until 1972, the second stage, he continued to endorse Democratic candidates for President. Moving beyond Hollywood, he became nationally visible in 1963 in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From 1965 until 1971, he served as the elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, and clashed with his liberal rival Ed Asner. In 1968, he used his "cowboy" persona to publicize gun control measures.
  The third stage began in 1972. Like many neoconservatives of the same era who moved from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, he rejected the liberalism of George McGovern and supported Richard Nixon in 1972 for President. In the 1980s, he gave strong support to Ronald Reagan during his conservative presidency. In 1995, Heston entered his fourth stage by establishing his own political action fund-raising committee and jumped into the internal politics of the National Rifle Association. He gave numerous culture wars speeches and interviews upholding the conservative position, blaming media and academia for imposing affirmative action, which he saw as unfair reverse discrimination.
  Heston campaigned for Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1956, although he was unable to campaign for John F. Kennedy in 1960 due to filming on El Cid in Spain. Reportedly, when in 1961 a segregated Oklahoma movie theater was showing his movie El Cid for the first time, he joined a picket line outside. Heston made no reference to this in his autobiography but describes traveling to Oklahoma City to picket segregated restaurants, to the chagrin of the producers of El Cid, Allied Artists. During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom held in Washington, DC, in 1963, he accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. In later speeches, he said he helped the civil rights cause "long before Hollywood found it fashionable".
  In the 1964 election, he endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson, who had masterminded the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress over the vociferous opposition of Southern Democrats. That year, Heston publicly opposed California Proposition 14 that rolled back the state's fair housing law, the Rumford Fair Housing Act.
  In his 1995 autobiography, In the Arena, written after he became a conservative Republican, Heston wrote that while driving back from the set of The War Lord, he saw a "Barry Goldwater for President" billboard with his campaign slogan "In Your Heart You Know He's Right" and thought to himself, "Son of a bitch, he is right." Heston later said that his support for Goldwater was the event that helped turn him against gun control laws. Following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Heston, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and James Stewart issued a statement in support of President Johnson's Gun Control Act of 1968. The Johnson White House had solicited Heston's support. He endorsed Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 Presidential election.
  Heston opposed the Vietnam War during its course (though he changed his opinion in the years following the war) and in 1969 was approached by the Democratic Party to run for the U.S. Senate against incumbent George Murphy. He agonized over the decision but ultimately determined he could never give up acting. He is reported to have voted for Richard Nixon in 1972, though Nixon is not mentioned in his autobiography.
  By the 1980s, Heston supported gun rights and changed his political affiliation from Democratic to Republican. When asked why he changed political alliances, Heston replied "I didn't change. The Democratic Party changed." In 1987, he first registered as a Republican. He campaigned for Republicans and Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
  Heston resigned in protest from Actors Equity, saying the union's refusal to allow a white actor to play a Eurasian role in Miss Saigon was "obscenely racist".
  Heston charged that CNN's telecasts from Baghd
caption: Charlton Heston (left) with James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, and Harry Belafonte at the Civil Rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 1963: Sidney Poitier is in the background.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1853", "Image ImageLength": "2000", "Image BitsPerSample": "8", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "1", "Image ImageDescription": "Portrait", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "1", "Image XResolution": "200", "Image YResolution": "200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop", "Image DateTime": "2013:10:03 20:29:03", "Image Artist": "NARA", "Image ExifOffset": "262", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2011:06:02 09:33:16", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1853", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2000"}