Photograph by Elfie Semotan
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Danny Glover: The Fire Within
May & June 2004
A self-described child of the Civil Rights Movement, Glover still fights for the oppressed,
only now the whole world is his stage
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If you know Danny Glover only from his role as detective Roger Murtaugh in
the blockbuster Lethal Weapon series that made him a household name, a
conversation with the 58-year-old actor can catch you off-guard. In the flesh
he's as amiable as his best-known onscreen character—a big,
soft-spoken man with a raspy voice and a winning smile. But behind that grin
lies a keen political intelligence and a fervor for fixing what's wrong in
the world.
Glover is something of an anomaly in Hollywood—a celebrity who was
trying to give something back well before he was famous and rich enough to have
a lot to give. Indeed, the San Francisco native became an actor almost by
accident, the result of his involvement in community cultural programs as a
member of the Black Students Union at San Francisco State College in the late
'60s. Following graduation in 1971, Glover enrolled in the American
Conservatory Theater's Black Actors Workshop, where he fell under the spell
of South African playwright Athol Fugard. It was his 1982 performance on
Broadway in Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys that
won him national recognition and certified him as an actor to be reckoned
with.
Since his 1979 movie debut as a prisoner in Escape from Alcatraz,
Glover has appeared in more than 40 feature films, including the critically
acclaimed The Color Purple, based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize winner
Alice Walker. He has also produced and directed films for television, often
with a racial or political theme, including Buffalo Soldiers, about the
all-black cavalry units that helped conquer the U.S. West. On the drawing
boards is a film on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the former slave who
led Haiti to independence in 1801.
Yet it is his activism that continues to define Glover's life and keeps
him flying high, literally—the man lives on airplanes. He's board
chairman of the TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that
lobbies U.S. policymakers on behalf of African and Caribbean countries.
He's a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme,
which promotes economic development in poor countries. He also serves on the
board of The Algebra Project, a math empowerment program developed by civil
rights veteran Robert Moses.
As it happens, he arrived in New York for his interview with AARP The
Magazine fresh from a visit to Kenya, where he lent support to struggling
coffee growers. And October 14 to 16, he will be a featured speaker at the AARP Life@50+ Member Event at the Sands
Expo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. There, says Glover, his message will center
on how to keep meaning in our lives as we age: "Staying active means more
than just playing golf. I want people to remain politically active as we get
older. Stay engaged and provide wisdom for the next generation."
Q. You never stop. How long have you been an activist?
A. All of my life. I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement. I was seven
years old when the U.S. Supreme Court made the decision in Brown v. Board of
Education. From that point on, I followed the movement. I also followed it
through my parents. They were postal employees, were very involved in
restructuring their union after it was desegregated in 1948. It was a kind of
empowerment that my parents embraced; the Civil Rights Movement was tangential
to their own struggle. I was always privy to the discussions going on. Those
were the things that shaped me.
Q. Was there also something about growing up and going to college in San
Francisco that drew you into activism?
In San Francisco you had the Beat Generation. An outgrowth of that, to some
large degree, was the whole radicalization of Haight-Ashbury. Then there was
the Black Panther Party in Oakland. A number of us in the Black Students Union
(BSU) at San Francisco State worked in the Panthers'
free-breakfast-for-children program. We also helped them organize their
newspaper. Although we weren't in the party, we were all involved.
I lived in a political commune for a year. We embraced a lot of struggles
globally. The anti-Vietnam War movement positioned us. There were liberation
struggles going on in South Africa, the Portuguese colonies, and Zimbabwe. All
of those things converged into a very strong activism.
Q. What moved you from politics to the stage?
I don't think I would have been an actor had it not been for my
embracing Athol Fugard's writing. One of the things he allowed me to do was
learn the intricacy and beauty and the transforming power of dialogue. At the
same time, he gave me a basis for learning the craft of acting.
Q. Had you always had a secret desire to be an actor?
I never thought about being an actor. In 1967, the students at San Francisco
State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted
other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge
Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications
program—dance, newsletters, poetry, drama. That's how I got involved;
I got involved in a little play. As the BSU went through restructuring, I was
named the minister of culture. At 20 or 21 years old, I wasn't even
imaginative enough to know what that meant. But that's how I first got
involved in acting.
Q. Years later, you are an established star who can make blockbuster
movies on the one hand and films that could be described as high-minded on the
other. How do you achieve that balance?
When you've moved past a point where you're just scrambling for
jobs, you think about the things that you want to do. And the things that you
want to do are governed by what you've seen, what you choose to embrace.
Some of these things I saw in foreign films—African films, Cuban
films—long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I
started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring
to my projects.
Share Your Civil Rights Story
Read personal stories of the struggle for civil rights or share your own at
the Voices of Civil Rights
website.
Q. Aside from acting, what keeps you busiest these days?
One of my primary involvements has been the TransAfrica Forum. I'm
chairman of the board. It began 23 years ago in response to the apartheid
movement. One of its most notable victories was the creation of sanctions
against South Africa in 1986.
It now addresses such issues as the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, debt relief,
and reparations.
Q. Aside from getting them attention, what does your being a celebrity
bring to these issues?
I'm not so vain as to believe that my involvement changes anything
whatsoever. My best hope is to bring a tone through my engagement, drawing
attention to organizations that are often left out of the mainstream media. I
hope people become engaged in the dialogue and embrace these issues in such a
way that it doesn't generate hostility and fear.
For example, if I want to talk about the death penalty, I approach it from a
broad spectrum: its application to people of color; as a moral issue; from the
standpoint of the possibility of innocence—all of the ways people can
find some reason to finally ask, "Why is the state killing its own
citizens?"
Q. A survey on race relations commissioned by AARP and the Leadership
Conference on Civil Rights and published in this issue of AARP The Magazine
reveals increased tolerance in America. Does this indicate to you that
progress has been made in the last 50 years?
Harry Belafonte said to me that in one of his last conversations with Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. King wondered whether he was integrating his people
into a burning house. So Harry asked him, "What should we do?" Dr.
King answered, "We become firemen."
Have we become firemen in this process of integration? Does the mere
fact we have more black elected officials, more black mayors, and more black
doctors constitute some degree of success? Does the mere presence of us on Wall
Street alter the configuration of power, the configuration of policy?
As we look at our inner cities, we could say that despite all these
positions, the policies toward our inner cities, our schools, and our children
have been a failure.
Q. So, you maintain that progress has not been made?
What has this progress meant for the majority of black people? Since 1957,
black people have experienced double-digit unemployment—in good times and
bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They
represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent
of those on death row.
If African Americans are going to be firemen for the whole house, then why
haven't we been more active in fighting for universal health care? Why
haven't we been more active on the moral issues? Maybe it's been the
level of leadership or the undermining of local leadership.
Q. Isn't the presence of people like Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice
on the world stage evidence of gains by blacks?
What is Powell's personal relationship to us? Is he a person who really
is a man of peace? Or is he just a part of the fabric, a tool that happens to
be black? He has all the credentials, just as Condoleeza Rice has the
credentials. What they've done is learned the rhetoric very well and they
just happen to be black.
Q. You say the power structure has not changed. Still, the AARP-LCCR
survey suggests at least a change at the personal level in the attitudes of
people.
In the abstract, yes. But what does it really mean? Does it mean we gain an
understanding of the emotional pain, the historical pain of others? Does it
mean we have compassion? Do we add a discussion of what you're afraid of,
what I'm afraid of?
Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how
successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in
this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that
point.
Q. You paint a disappointing picture. Is there anything happening that
makes you optimistic?
I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I
can. The progressive movement against the war of occupation in Iraq is a reason
for hope, as is resistance to free trade agreements in Latin America. Those are
moments that we have to celebrate: that people still find the resolve and
energy to resist.
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