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Vol. 73/No. 2      January 19, 2009

 
Eartha Kitt: opposed Vietnam War
 
BY SAM MANUEL  
Eartha Kitt died December 25. She was one of the most talented African American female recording, stage, and screen artists who overcame both racist and sexist barriers in Hollywood and the recording industry. Her screen performances included leading roles with Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., and Nat King Cole. She won two Emmy awards, was nominated for a third, and also nominated for two Tonys and a Grammy.

She was also subjected to blacklisting and an FBI investigation after she spoke her mind at a White House luncheon in the middle of the Vietnam War.

Kitt started life on a poor sharecropper’s cotton farm in South Carolina. She was sent north to live with relatives in a Harlem tenement and helped support her aunt and herself working long hours in a sewing factory that made uniforms.

The young Kitt showed talent at singing and dancing and got her first break with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe, touring the world with the famous company of Black female dancers. Her travels heightened her interest in world events and peoples in other lands. Her album, That Bad Eartha, released by RCA in 1955, featured selections sung in English, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Swahili.

Kitt came under government and entertainment industry attack following her attendance at a Jan. 18, 1968, White House luncheon. She then would be forced to pursue her career in Europe until the late 1970s when she returned to the United States.

The gathering, given by Lady Bird Johnson, was to promote an “anticrime” campaign which then-president Lyndon Johnson had featured in his “State of the Union” address the previous evening.

The president himself made brief remarks at the luncheon. As he was leaving, Kitt interrupted to ask what he would do about parents who had to work and were too busy to provide adequate care for their children. The president tried to brush her off saying his new social security bill would help.

After the remaining speakers finished, Kitt took the floor in the discussion saying, “Young people and their parents are angry because they are being so highly taxed and there’s a war going on… . You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the streets.”

Lady Bird Johnson’s voiced trembled, tears welling in her eyes, according to a New York Post report, as she attempted to respond.

Afterwards Kitt told reporters her impression of Johnson. “I’m afraid she became a little flustered,” Kitt said. Regarding her own remarks she answered with her trademark confidence—“I see nothing wrong with the way I handled myself. I can only hope it will do some good.”  
 
 
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