Shortly before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attended a strategy meeting held at Harry Belafonte’s New York home. These occasional meetings, Belafonte said, took place prior to embarking on major campaigns.

At this particular meeting, Belafonte noticed that King seemed very distracted and deep in thought. He asked him what he was thinking about. King told him African Americans had come a long way in their struggle for their rights. They were going to change the laws of segregation, and had begun embarking on the most difficult of their undertakings: adjusting economic priorities.

King told Belafonte that in “this poor people’s campaign” he had sensed the mood around nation, and had come to understand that the idea of integration wouldn’t be as easy as they thought or would like it to be.

“I think we’ll be integrating into a burning house,” King told Belafonte, who found the remarks disconcerting.

Belafonte asked King if that was the case, what should they do? King’s response: “We’re going to just have to become firemen.”

Speaking to a capacity crowd at the 16th annual “Keeper of the Dream” event at Oakland University, Belafonte said he didn’t understand at the time how prophetic that remark was until the dawning of the 21st century.

“Keeper of the Dream” honors the legacy of Dr. King. Belafonte, 81, met King when he was 26 and King was 24. Over the decades, he has gained international respect as a human rights activist, as well as for his achievements as singer, actor and producer.

Belafonte said when affirmative action came under severe attack earlier this decade, he knew that he and others in the Civil Rights Movement had to re-engage.

“Then when the leaders who took over this nation began to lie to its citizens; began to grossly use the power around them to obstruct truth; to lead us to dark and difficult times; to lead us into a war in which thousands of Americans would not only lose their lives, but participate in the taking of the lives of hundreds of thousands of other people, in a war in which we had no business no right, I understood what Dr. King meant when he said we’re integrating into a burning house,” Belafonte said to applause.

He also said affirmative action wasn’t invented to challenge people’s legal rights, but was created to give citizens who for centuries had been oppressed an opportunity to reach a level playing field.

Another incident that reinforced for Belafonte that we are integrating into a burning house came in the spring of 2005 when he saw a “breaking news” story that surprised and disturbed him. A five-year-old Black girl in St. Petersburg, Fla., was thrown across a desk and handcuffed by three White police officers. She was subsequently shackled and taken to jail.

“Struck dumb” by those images, he called civil rights activist and lawyer Constance Rice, who helped found the nonprofit Advancement Project, to ask her to tell him what he was looking at. From her he learned that while the situation wasn’t yet pandemic, it was at a critical state, as there were hundreds of such cases around the country.

Belafonte said such incidents happen because in our schools, we no longer provide the “kind of caring, loving tutoring,” the kind of care children should receive if they’re unruly. Instead, the solution is to arrest them.

He decided to call a “meeting of the elders” in Atlanta. More than 200 people came to address what society was doing about child incarceration. However, after listening to various speeches and statements of righteous indignation, he realize he had brought the wrong group; that those people were missing the boat.

He noted the irony. Decades ago, when those men and women had been in their teens and twenties, they had realized the leaders of their day had likewise missed the boat, so they would engage in ways that were more immediately connected to issues of those times.

With that in mind, Belafonte called together the youth of today. With assistance from Rice and other leaders deeply immersed in the prison system, he began to reach out to gang communities.

“Dr. King said we had to become firemen, and we’d tried everything else,” he said.

The first of what would be five gatherings of youth took place in Epps, Ala. With the facts that America has the largest prison population in the world, and that Black and Hispanic youth making up the largest and second largest percentage of those serving time, respectively; and that as a matter of national policy, we build more prison cells than schools in mind, those gathered talked about violence in the community and how to change it.

The young men and women, some suspicious of his motives, asked what his agenda was. He said he had nothing to offer himself, and that the agenda was to find the agenda.

Subsequent gatherings took place in Santa Cruz, Calif.; on a reservation hosted by the Onondaga Nation; in Appalachia, at the Alex Haley Farm in Tennessee; and in Orange County, Calif.

Belafonte said it took a few years to convince these young men and women of his sincerity. But the movement, now officially called the Gathering for Justice, will have its next meeting April 4 in Memphis, on the anniversary of King’s assassination. At that time, the Gathering will officially declare itself in existence, and set forth on its mission to non-violently engage in confrontation with oppression.

The Gathering for Justice information can be found at www.thegatheringforjustice.org.

Following Belafonte’s remarks, six young women were honored with the Keeper of the Dream scholarship awards. The recipients were Yakela Roberson, third year medical laboratory science student; Jinae Stoudemire, a third year pre-med/biology student; Latonia Garrett, a journalism major; Avery Neale, also pursuing a medical degree; Denise R. Jones, psychology major; and Ronée Harvey, medical laboratory science major.