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    Tony Bennett’s Commitment to Civil Rights

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    The singer witnessed racism in the military and in the music industry, experiences that informed his decision to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965.In explaining the roots of his commitment to civil rights, Tony Bennett often told a story from his Army days, when he brought a Black soldier as his guest to Thanksgiving dinner, prompting a furious reprimand and a demotion.It was 1945, three years before the end of segregation in the U.S. military, and Bennett, who had been drafted into World War II shortly after he had turned 18, happened to run into a high school friend and fellow serviceman in occupied Germany. As he brought the friend, Frank Smith, to the holiday meal in the white servicemen’s mess hall, an officer intercepted them in a rage, Bennett recalled in his 1998 autobiography.“It was actually more acceptable to fraternize with the German troops than it was to be friendly with a fellow Black American soldier!” Bennett recalled in the book, “The Good Life.”Bennett recalled that in that moment, the officer took out a razor blade and cut the corporal stripes from his uniform, spitting on them and throwing them to the floor. He was then assigned to dig up the bodies of soldiers in mass graves so that they could be reburied with more dignity.“For a while the whole affair soured me on the human race,” Bennett remembered in the autobiography.It was a pivotal moment for the young singer, who returned from the war focused on developing his music career. Twenty years and a whirlwind of fame later, Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, performing for marchers alongside other musicians such as Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and Joan Baez.As his death on Friday at 96 unearthed memories of Bennett’s suave affability and charm as one of the foremost purveyors of the American songbook, it also prompted recollections of Bennett as a steadfast advocate for civil rights.Bennett’s career took off in the 1950s and ’60s, and as he joined jazz circles that included greats such as Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington, he came to witness the blatant racism that had been ingrained in the American entertainment industry. Cole, for example, could not sit down in the dining room of the club where he had been performing, Bennett recalled, and Ellington wasn’t allowed to attend the party at the hotel where he and Bennett were top billing.“I’d never been politically inclined, but these things went beyond politics,” Bennett said in his autobiography. “Nat and Duke were geniuses, brilliant human beings who gave the world some of the most beautiful music it’s ever heard, and yet they were treated like second-class citizens.”In 1965, Belafonte asked him to attend the march to Montgomery, explaining that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that entertainers could help rally media attention, he recalled in the book. Bennett agreed, traveling with the singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine. He said in his autobiography that the march reminded him of fighting his way into Germany at the end of the war, comparing the hostility of the Germans to that of the white state troopers.The day before the marchers reached the Alabama State Capitol, Bennett was among the performers at a rally in a field where the marchers were camping for the night, singing from a makeshift stage built from coffin crates and plywood.When Bennett and Eckstine left the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove them to the airport. She was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.In a 2007 documentary about Bennett, Belafonte recalled that his friend brought the “spirit of the Second World War into our vision of the America of the future.”The singer’s commitment to the cause persisted. According to the 2011 biography of Bennett, “All the Things You Are,” the singer also refused to perform in apartheid-era South Africa. Coretta Scott King has said that he remained committed to the King Center, the organization she created after her husband’s assassination. In Atlanta, Bennett has a spot on the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.In his later years, Bennett dedicated much of his charitable contributions to arts education, establishing a public high school in Queens called Frank Sinatra School of the Arts with Susan Benedetto, whom he married in 2007, and a nonprofit that funds arts programming at schools in need of support.In his final years, when discussing social justice, Bennett would often quote the singer Ella Fitzgerald, who attended the Selma-to-Montgomery march as well: “Tony, we are all here,” he said she told him.“All the tribulations, the wars, the prejudice — and everything that divides us — simply melt away,” he told Vanity Fair in 2016, “when you realize that we’re all together on one planet and that every problem should have a solution.” More

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      Harry Belafonte on His Artistic Values and His Activism

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      In interviews and articles in The New York Times, Mr. Belafonte, who died on Tuesday, spoke about the civil rights movement and his frustration with how Black life was depicted onscreen.Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.A child of Harlem, Mr. Belafonte used his platform at the height of the entertainment world to speak out frequently on his music, how Black life was depicted onscreen and, most important to him, the civil rights movement. Here are some of the insights Mr. Belafonte provided to The New York Times during his many decades in the public spotlight, as they appeared at the time:His musicMr. Belafonte’s string of hits, including “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” helped create an American obsession with Caribbean music that led his record company to promote him as the “King of Calypso.”But Mr. Belafonte never embraced that sort of monarchical title, rejecting “purism” as a “cover-up for mediocrity” and explaining that he saw his work as a mash-up of musical styles.He told The New York Times Magazine in 1959 that folk music had “hidden within it a great dramatic sense, and a powerful lyrical sense.” He also plainly conceded: “I don’t have a great voice.”In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some insights into what may be going on globally, from what I’ve experienced.”He said that “Day-O,” for instance, was a way of life.“It’s a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said. “It’s a classic work song.”His views on film and televisionMr. Belafonte’s success in music helped him become a Hollywood leading man. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier landed more substantive and nuanced roles than Black actors had previously received.Nonetheless, Mr. Belafonte was left largely unsatisfied.Writing for The Times in 1968, he complained that “the real beauty, the soul, the integrity of the black community is rarely reflected” on television.“The medium is dominated by white-supremacy concepts and racist attitudes,” he wrote. “TV excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither networks nor sponsors want that.”Mr. Belafonte emphasized that his 10-year-old son saw few Black heroes on television.“The nobility in his heritage and the values that could complement his positive growth and sense of manhood are denied him,” he wrote. “Instead, there is everything to tear him down and give him an inferiority complex. He will see the Negro only as a rioter and a social problem, never as a whole human being.”Roughly 25 years later, Mr. Belafonte was circumspect, suggesting in an interview with The Times that little had changed.“Even today, on the big screen, the pictures that are always successful are pictures where blacks appear in the way white America buys it,” he said in 1993. “And we’re told that what we really want to express is not profitable and is not commercially viable.”His politics and activismEven as Mr. Belafonte was in the prime of his entertainment career, he was intently focused on activism and civil rights.“Back in 1959,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in 1981, “I fully believed in the civil-rights movement. I had a personal commitment to it, and I had my personal breakthroughs — I produced the first black TV special; I was the first black to perform at the Waldorf Astoria. I felt if we could just turn the nation around, things would fall into place.”But Mr. Belafonte lamented that by the middle of the 1970s, the movement had ended.“When the doors of Hollywood shut on minorities and blacks at the end of the 70’s,” he said, “a lot of black artists had been enjoying the exploitation for 10 years. But one day they found the shop had closed down.”Mr. Belafonte remained outspoken about politics in his later years. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master”; he called President George W. Bush a “terrorist” in 2006, and lamented in 2012 that modern celebrities had “turned their back on social responsibility.”“There’s no evidence that artists are of the same passion and of the same kind of commitment of the artists of my time,” he told The Times in 2016. “The absence of black artists is felt very strongly because the most visible oppression is in the black community.”In 2016 and again in 2020, he visited the opinion pages of The Times to urge voters to reject Donald J. Trump.“The vote is perhaps the single most important weapon in our arsenal,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in the 2016 article. “The same things needed now are the same things needed before,” he added. “Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die. ” More

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      in Theater

      Tennessee Law Limiting ‘Cabaret’ Shows Raises Uncertainty About Drag Events

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      The measure is part of a wave of legislation by conservative lawmakers across the country against drag performances. Many are wondering how it will be applied.NASHVILLE — A bill signed into law this week in Tennessee makes staging “adult cabaret” on public property or anywhere a child could see it a criminal offense. The law forbids performances in those places by topless, go-go or exotic dancers, strippers, or male or female impersonators who, as the law defines it, provides entertainment that is “harmful to minors.” The word “drag” does not appear in the legislation. And to some legal experts, the description provided in the letter of the law would not apply to drag as they know it. But many in the state are still trying to grasp how the measure will ultimately affect drag events, theater performances that involve drag, and even transgender and gender nonconforming people as they go about their lives.The law is part of a cascade of legislation across the country fueled by a conservative backlash to drag events, which has also spurred protests from far-right groups and threats directed at performers. Now that it is one of the first to succeed, with lawmakers in other states pursuing legislation with similarly ambiguous language, the law has prompted concerns about how it will be enforced and the implications it could have.“The murkiness of this law is causing a lot of people to be on edge,” said Micah Winter, a performer and board member of Friends of George’s, a theater company in Memphis whose shows are often centered on drag.Proponents of the legislation have described it as a way to safeguard children, asserting that drag events can have sexualized language and suggestive performances that may be too mature for younger viewers.“This bill gives confidence to parents that they can take their kids to a public or private show and will not be blindsided by a sexualized performance,” Jack Johnson, the Republican state senator who sponsored the legislation, said on Twitter.Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee giving his State of the State address in February. Mark Zaleski/Associated PressStill, the legislation figures into a campaign by conservative lawmakers across the country to curb the rights of people in the L.G.B.T.Q. community. In Tennessee, one proposal would block transgender people from changing the gender listed on their drivers’ licenses, and on Thursday, the same day Gov. Bill Lee signed the adult cabaret bill, he approved legislation that prevents all puberty-delaying treatment, hormone therapies and referrals for transgender children to receive gender-affirming medical care in the state.Drag has become more mainstream in Tennessee, as in much of the country. Performers in vibrant costumes that upend gender assumptions could simply be reading a book, promoting acceptance and literacy. Or they might be “reading” — that is, playfully mocking — tourists piled onto buses rolling through Nashville or lip-syncing in variety shows in boozy brunches in Memphis or Chattanooga.“Not one of our performers on this bus has ever shown more skin than a Titans’ cheerleader on a Sunday afternoon,” David Taylor, an owner of the Big Drag Bus Tour in Nashville and bars that host drag events, said in a hearing on the legislation.Legal experts said the equivocal wording meant that the adult cabaret law was not exactly a ban on drag but could still have consequences.“It’s an anti-drag law,” said Kathy Sinback, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, “because they passed it intentionally to try to chill and prevent people from doing drag, but that’s not really what the law says.”“It should not even touch any drag performances,” she added. But after watching public commentary and a series of legislative hearings debating the merits of the bill, she said, “it’s clear that some people think that drag in and of itself as an art form is obscene and that it should not be viewed by children.”But Ms. Sinback said the parameters set in the legislation should not apply to most drag performances, given that they would have to be considered extremely sexual or violent, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific values, and be considered broadly offensive and obscene to a child to warrant charging the performer with a crime.Mr. Johnson said that the law was not meant to target drag performances in general or discriminate against the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “It simply puts age restrictions in place to ensure that children are not present at sexually explicit performances,” he said in an interview with CNN.Critics said the legislation reflected what many in the gay and transgender community have described as a bleak and dangerous climate in Tennessee, threatening people who are often marginalized and already uniquely vulnerable. The law over medical care has provoked the most alarm. The Tennessee chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics opposed the law, saying in a statement that it will “significantly limit our ability to practice to the standard of care established by numerous national medical organizations.”Sruti Swaminathan, a staff attorney for Lambda Legal, which is working with other civil liberties groups in mounting a legal challenge to the legislation barring gender-affirming care, said, “This is clearly an effort to villainize us and isolate us because they fear our resilience and our self-love and our collective power.”People protesting against the bill on cabaret restrictions in Knoxville, Tenn., in February. Jamar Coach/News Sentinel, via ReutersTennessee is one of more than a dozen states where conservative lawmakers, focusing on issues of gender and identity, have pursued legislation that explicitly or otherwise seeks to impose restrictions on drag events.Some of the bills would require venues to register as adult entertainment spaces or “sexually oriented businesses,” and others would forbid performances at schools or libraries. A proposal in Arizona would outlaw drag performances within a quarter-mile of public playgrounds and schools.The law in Tennessee has not yet spurred a legal challenge, but activists and lawyers were prepared to start one as they watched to see how it is applied. Those who violate the law will be charged with a misdemeanor or a felony for continued offenses.The drag performer Poly Tics attending a rally in Kentucky on Thursday. Bruce Schreiner/Associated PressIn Kentucky, where the State Legislature has advanced a sprawling bill to curtail health care access for L.G.B.T.Q. children, lawmakers had also considered restrictions that included prohibiting what the state classifies as “adult performances” from operating within 1,000 feet of child care facilities, schools, public parks, homes or places of worship. The legislation was amended on Thursday to limit such performances from taking place in public places or a location where the performance could be viewed by a child — a step that critics of the legislation took as a victory.“This version is much more narrowly tailored to just explicit sexual content,” said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group in Kentucky, who acknowledged that much of his organization’s limited energy was focused on challenging the legislation on restricting gender-affirming health care.Compared with other proposals on L.G.B.T.Q. issues that advocates contend will have immediate and damaging impact, the ones that are tied to drag stir worries rooted more in uncertainty.For transgender and gender nonconforming people, who face a heightened threat of violence, some fear the law could be wielded as a tool to further discriminate against them.“The language is vague enough that it leaves it in the hands of each individual jurisdiction to define what counts as a ‘male or female impersonator,’” said Dahron Johnson, who works in community outreach with the Tennessee Equality Project. “They could say I, just going about my daily life, am an ‘impersonator.’”In theater, there is a long history of performance featuring cross-dressing and drag — Shakespeare famously employed male actors to play female roles — and many touring shows feature some variation on the practice: “The Lion King” (a male meerkat, Timon, dons a dress to dance the Charleston), “Hairspray” (the protagonist’s mother is often played by a man in drag) and “1776” (now touring with a new production in which all the male characters are played by female, transgender and nonbinary actors).“Hairspray” and many other theater productions feature drag performances.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re absolutely opposed to any legislation that restricts the rights of our producers to present stories we’ve been presenting for 4,000 years,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers and presenters around the country. Ms. Martin said the league is “very concerned” about the legislation under consideration in multiple states.Brett Batterson, the president and chief executive of the Orpheum Theatre Group in Memphis, said that on Friday, he paused conversations about bringing to Memphis a solo show, “Dixie’s Tupperware Party,” a small, long-running and popular touring production that has played all over America and is performed by a man in drag.“We decided we would pause our discussion to see how some of the language is interpreted,” Mr. Batterson said. “I think the law will be challenged, and we want to see how it plays out.”For now, Friends of George’s was not ready to change any of its plans. “We think it’s outrageous, but we’re forging ahead with our next production in spite of everything,” said Ty Phillips, the nonprofit’s vice president.Yet uncertainty remained. Mr. Winter noted that over the years he has played Mother Ginger in “The Nutcracker” and the mother in “Hairspray.”“Can I still do that?” he asked. More

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      Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship

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      The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More

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      in Movies

      ‘My Name Is Pauli Murray’ Review: Ahead of the Times

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      The pioneering legal thinker influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But this documentary by the filmmakers behind “RBG” misses the mark.“My Name Is Pauli Murray,” the plainly pedagogical documentary by the filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, hinges on the audience not knowing who Murray was: an activist, writer, attorney and priest. The easier to wow us with the onslaught of information, which rightfully situates Murray — a Black, gender nonconforming intellectual who died in 1985 — as a thinker ahead of the times.As the first African American student to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School, Murray was a civil rights trailblazer, and an early architect of the idea that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should guarantee not just racial but gender equality. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the film’s many talking heads, explicitly cites Murray in one of her related Supreme Court opinions. Also touted is Murray’s refusal to sit at the back of the bus 15 years before Rosa Parks captured national attention by doing the same.Indeed, Murray’s story is a remarkable — and extensive — one that the filmmakers stuff into an hour and a half that feels like a dull and disorganized PowerPoint lecture.Murray was also a prolific writer who left behind troves of letters, diaries, poems and manuscripts detailing personal struggles with institutional rejection on the basis of gender or race (or often both) as well as romantic relationships with women. West and Cohen attempt to humanize their subject via these documents, but the effect feels cheesy and hollow, in no small part because of the overabundance of material. Along with audio recordings of Murray, the sound of a clacking typewriter is prominent and Murray’s cursive handwriting often floats across the screen.In “My Name is Pauli,” the filmmakers touch on more compelling themes than in their Ginsburg hagiography, “RBG,” by singling out a figure whose life and work reminds us that more complex and fluid understandings of race and gender are not strictly modern phenomena. But the result feels an awful lot like an illustrated textbook.My Name Is Pauli MurrayRated PG-13. 20th-century cruelty. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Push to ‘Free Britney’ Gains Steam on Capitol Hill

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      As lawmakers share social media posts and messages of solidarity, activists hope the increased attention on Britney Spears’s conservatorship case will prompt legislative change.In the weeks since Britney Spears publicly denounced the long-running legal arrangement that has controlled her life, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have jumped in to declare their support.Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, dedicated the latest episode of his podcast to the conservatorship, which has limited Ms. Spears’s decision-making and finances since 2008. “I am squarely and unequivocally in the camp of #FreeBritney,” he said, referring to the movement among her fans and fellow celebrities pushing for the end of the arrangement.Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, excoriated the case as “the craziest” he had “seen in a long time.”And the political arm of the House Republican caucus seized the moment to fund-raise, sending texts that described Ms. Spears as “a victim of toxic gov’t overreach & censorship.”Advocates are embracing the increased attention from members of Congress, saying that the case raises issues of civil liberties as well as the potential for such legal mechanisms to be abused, including by forcing the use of birth control, as Ms. Spears has contended. But they are also urging lawmakers to enact legislative change that could help those trapped in exploitative arrangements.“It’s always attractive for lawmakers to send out tweets,” said Cassandra Dumas, a founder of Free Britney America, which is based in Washington. “But my call to our lawmakers is, actions speak louder than words.”Ms. Dumas said that while members of her group initially united over Ms. Spears’s case, they were eager to push for changes that would help others in similar situations but who do not have access to the same resources.Another challenge is understanding how pervasive any abuse might be, advocates said.“We don’t even know how many people are in conservatorships and guardianships,” said Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s disability rights program. “We don’t know how long they’ve been there in them. We don’t know whether they want to be there. We don’t know why they’re there. We don’t know whether they have their own lawyers.”Free Britney America has worked with members of Congress in recent weeks, including Representative Charlie Crist, Democrat of Florida, whose office said he would soon introduce bipartisan legislation pressing for more rights and more transparency under such legal agreements.Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, for their part, have homed in on the lack of data about the prevalence of guardianships and conservatorships. In a letter, they urged the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department to work on closing that gap.In her testimony last month, Ms. Spears revealed that her father, who is her conservator, prevented her from having her IUD removed although she wanted to have more children. The disclosure prompted support from across the political sphere, including leaders at Planned Parenthood and Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina.“It’s insane you can force a woman to basically sterilize herself under the guise of protection,” Ms. Mace tweeted. “If this is happening to Britney Spears, how many other women across the country are silently suffering?” More

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      in Television

      Bill McCreary Dies at 87; Blazed Trail for Black Journalists on TV

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      He was hired at what became the Fox flagship station in New York in 1967, when there were few Black faces on the air, and became an Emmy-winning anchor.Bill McCreary, an Emmy Award-winning reporter who was one of the first Black television journalists in New York, and whose perspective helped fill a noticeable gap in local public affairs reporting, died on April 4 in Brooklyn. He was 87.The cause was a neurological disease he had for many years, said O’Kellon McCreary, his wife of 62 years and only immediate survivor.His death, which had not been made public earlier by his family, was announced this week by WNYW, the flagship station of the Fox television network. He was hired in 1967 when the station, Channel 5, was owned by Metromedia and known as WNEW, and he remained a familiar on-air presence until he retired in 2000.As a co-anchor, Mr. McCreary helped build the station’s 10 O’Clock News into a ratings powerhouse. He became the managing editor and anchor of the weekly program “Black News” in 1970 and of “The McCreary Report” in 1978, when he was also named a vice president of Fox 5 News.As the civil rights movement exploded on television screens, a demand also grew for Black journalists to be seen and heard. Mr. McCreary, Bob Teague on WNBC, and Gil Noble and Melba Tolliver of WABC were among the few seen on local newscasts in New York at the time.“There was no such thing as ethnic television, because none of us were on TV,” Mr. McCreary told The Daily News of New York in 1997. “So it happens that along came the inner-city thing, places like Bed-Stuy and Harlem, and the news directors suddenly realized, ‘Hey, we don’t have any connections in these Black communities.’ There were less than a handful of us on television back then.”William McKinley McCreary was born on Aug. 8, 1933, in Blackville, S.C., to Simon and Ollie McCreary. He moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan as an infant with his mother, who became a teacher’s assistant.A graduate of Seward Park High School and Baruch College in Manhattan, he served in the Army from 1953 to 1955. His first broadcasting jobs were in radio, as an announcer at WWRL in Queens and a general-assignment reporter and news director at WLIB in Manhattan.He began reporting for WNEW on March 13, 1967, the first day of the station’s nightly newscast.He won a local Emmy for “Black News” and shared an Emmy for anchoring with John Roland on the 10 O’Clock News — a program preceded every night (as it still is) by the somber signature intonation “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”Mr. McCreary and Dr. Gerald Deas of Kings County Hospital and SUNY Downstate Medical Center shared a commendation from the Food and Drug Administration for alerting the public, on “The McCreary Report” in the 1970s, to the dangers of consuming Argo brand starch. In 1987, Mr. McCreary was given the N.A.A.C.P.’s Black Heritage Award.Among the figures he interviewed over the course of his career were Rosa Parks, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.“Unlike a lot of TV journalists today, Bill gave you the news, not his opinions,” his former colleague Judy Licht said by email. “Straight and to the point, you never knew where he stood on any issue.”He was also a mentor to a generation of Black journalists. Cheryl Wills, an award-winning reporter for the news channel NY1 who met Mr. McCreary when she was a production assistant at Fox 5, said: “Black newscasters were frowned upon for telling the truth about discrimination and other societal ills in urban America. Bill McCreary told the unvarnished truth, and that’s what set him apart. He told it with tremendous dignity and integrity.” More