the country did not want to hear or did not hear,” Baldwin told the audience. “What Rosa Parks was saying in Montgomery, in 1956, and what the Negroes were saying in their march . . . Instead, he told a brief story about the promise of the early days of the civil-rights movement, a promise that was betrayed by the country. In any case, Baldwin had not been expecting to introduce King, and his short speech said little about the leader. How Baldwin ended up at the fund-raiser is unclear, although Marlon Brando, who organized it, may have invited him the two were close. to focus on electing Democrats to political office, not on building a tent city or staging sit-ins at congressional offices. For others, such as Bayard Rustin, a trusted adviser to King since the days of the Montgomery bus boycott, such an act of civil disobedience courted violence and threatened to turn even more white Americans against the civil-rights agenda. The idea of occupying the nation’s capital with poor people scared many activists-even some on the board of the S.C.L.C. King found that many who once supported his desegregation efforts were less than enthusiastic about his agenda on jobs and poverty. Desegregating lunch counters didn’t cost much, but ending poverty would cost the nation billions of dollars. To do so, he would need to marshal greater financial resources than ever before. King wanted to make the case for massive direct action, in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the country’s impoverished. The fund-raiser was meant to replenish the coffers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.) and to help fund King’s latest project, the Poor People’s Campaign. There were even rumors that someone had suggested a darkened Charlton Heston. Baldwin wanted Billy Dee Williams to play the lead, but the studio had other actors in mind. Though eager, he had ended up fighting desperately to bring his story of Malcolm to the screen. ![]() Baldwin had recently arrived in Los Angeles from New York, after Columbia Pictures had bought the rights to Alex Haley’s “ The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and asked Baldwin to write the script. On March 16, 1968, James Baldwin walked to the podium at a fund-raiser, at Anaheim’s Disneyland Hotel, to introduce Dr.
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