Thread by @michaelharriot

A lot of outlets have been telling the story of Tony Bennett marching with MLK.

But have you ever heard the story about how “wokeness,” DEI, Jesus, an actual anti-racist, 2 church choirs & 1 of the greatest dance moves of all time got Tony Bennett into show biz?

A thread

The story begins when Black soldiers returned from WWI & white folks went wild & just started killing Black veterans. The Klan’s numbers surged, sparking the “Red Summer of 1919”

history.com/news/red-summe…

This 2nd wake Klan “America First” movement wasn’t just anti-Black, tho. It was anti-Catholic & anti… well, anything but white people. And this wasn’t just a Southern movement.

And if you’re wondering, about the white Catholics, well…

smithsonianmag.com/history/behold…

While all this was going on, Irish & Italian Catholics started their own movement to kick Black folks out of their churches.

So in 1922, Monsignor Bernard Quinn, a white Catholic priest, started his own Black Catholic Church in Brooklyn, St. Paul Claver.

nytimes.com/2010/06/25/nyr…

Then he opened an orphanage for Black children and you know they had 1 helluva choir. Of course, the Klan burned it down.

He built it back.

They burned it down AGAIN.

But if the Catholic Church was so racist, where was he getting all this money?

The choir, of course!

They really had one of the baddest children’s choirs around! Can you imagine having all the talent in NYC on 1 choir?

Plus, there was this other movement starting in NYC—the “New Negro” movement & the Harlem renaissance. A lot of that musical talent came out of this church

They basically had choir practice EVERY DAY. Lena Horne was on the choir, and supported the orphanage her entire career. Tap dancer Bill Bailey started there.

Who’s Bill Bailey?

He was a battle dancer.

Seriously, he went on the road with Duke Ellington & had ONE JOB.

Every night in the show, he’d battle the legendary Bill Bojangles Robinson, perhaps the greatest tap dancer who ever lived. (Fun fact, Bojangles held the world record for running backwards )

But here’s the thing: Bailey won A LOT of those battles: because he had a secret weapon

Instead of walking onstage, he’d do a move he called “the backslide,” that made it look like he was gliding on air. It’s hard to describe and some people say a guy named Michael Jackson did it better. But Bill Bailey was the 1st to backslide. Or as you know it,

The moonwalk.

That movie is “Cabin in the Sky.” Lena Horne was in it. Duke Ellington was in it. Count Basie was in it. The woman singing was Ethel Waters, the 2nd Black woman nominated for an Academy Award & the 1st to have her own TV show

How’d ALL the Black folk get in 1 movie?

Well, a few years earlier, Hattie McDaniel was the FIRST Black woman to win an Oscar for “Gone with the Wind,” a racist movie about something.

This ain’t CRT. Even B4 GWTW debuted, the NAACP protested it. So The filmmakers hired cultural sensitivity advisors…

white ones

And when it debuted, Black folks refused to go see it. At the Atlanta debut, they dressed a kids choir up as SLAVES!

One of them was a 10-year-old named Martin Luther King Jr.

St Paul Claver’s Choir would NEVER.

So when the MGM offered roles in Cabin in the Sky to everybody Black, all those Harlem Renaissance New Negroes who went to church together agreed on 1 condition:

The NAACP had to approve the script

Ron DeSantis would’ve lost his shit.

But these were the “New Negroes” - a group of Harlem Renaissance artists & Black activists who laid the foundation of the civil rights movement

loc.gov/exhibits/naacp…

Bill partied HARD. He was always out wilding and having fun. He still danced & he still went to church because his sister was in NY

Anyway, one day, bailey was at choir rehearsal with his lil sister, who wanted to be famous too. He said she wasn’t talented enough & made her go home. She was like: “I’ll show him.”

Her choir director told her a talent show at an up & coming theater in Harlem
- The Apollo

She entered and WON IT.

And since she went to church and her brother hung out with the New Negroes she was welcomed in and became a big star too. Even bigger than her brother!

She was doing movies! She was on the road with Duke Ellington & Lena Horne. She even did movies

But because they were big individual stars, they never got together much. And after WWII, a lot of work dried up. MGM wasn’t making big musicals, so everyone basically hit the road.

Then they got the opportunity of a lifetime!

Someone wanted to put the old band back together.

In 1949, MGM announced they were going to make a Bojangles Robinson biopic! The old crew agreed to be in it. They canceled tours & got the NAACP’s approval for the script. It was a done deal.

Since Bojangles had died, there was only one person who could play him

Bill Bailey.

So they contacted Bill, who was in NY, and guess what Bill said?

“Nah, I got the Holy Ghost now.”

Ninja WHAT?

No one believed him. Ol hard-partying Bill? They literally just needed him to backslide one more time.

So they got his sister to come talk to him. & he made a deal

“Tell’em to come see me preach. They’ll believe me then.”

Bruh, that dude preached his ASS off.

MGM made “Bojangles” 50 later, with Gregory Hines.

Bill’s sister hadn’t canceled her shows in NY though. She knew her brother loved church.

So of course all the legends came by her gigs & hung out with Bill’s little sister Pearl Bailey while they were in town.

And of course, if all those Black musical legends were in town, you know all the white stars were gonna come through. It was kind of a thing

Now this was 1949 at a white club in Greenwich Village. Literally every famous Black musician was in town that week & could fall through on any given night. But Pearl wanted to make her show “diverse.”

So she hired a white opener, probably the least famous musician in the place

So when Bob Hope asked who her opening act was, bc he wanted someone to take on the road, Pearl Bailey was like

“Some local kid named Tony Bennett. You like him?”

The rest is history.

Now here is the moral of the story :

Just because Tony Bennett was a diversity hire who got his job through affirmative action…

It doesn’t mean he wasn’t qualified.

For more history like this, listen to my new podcast:

listen.sonymusic-podcasts.link/Zs8DxAjO?c=E30…