Home > A great actor who stood against racism
By Monica Moorehead
A number of well-known actors have come under media and government attacks because of their progressive stances against war and racism. They include Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, Martin Sheen and Sean Penn.
Marlon Brando, who died July 1 at age 80, was the target of similar attacks more than a generation ago. In fact, he should be forever memorialized for his passionate concern for social justice as much as for taking method acting to unprecedented heights.
Many of Brando’s roles and films did not reflect what bourgeois critics might call his liberal politics.
He appeared in a reactionary, anti-union movie, "On the Waterfront." Some of the films he starred in were insensitive to women. Not a Latin@, he nevertheless portrayed the legendary Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in the 1952 film "Viva Zapata," which would understandably outrage the Latin@ community and their supporters. As an activist, he made the unfortunate choice of supporting the Zionist state of Israel, not the Palestinians.
But he also appeared in "Quemada" or "Burn," a progressive, anti-slavery movie.
Despite these contradictions, and more, Brando was considered a rebel on and off the screen. The press labeled him "eccentric," mainly for being anti-Hollywood and anti-establishment. But he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t believe in competition among actors for awards. He admitted that acting for him was a vehicle for making a living, for making a lot of money.
In his 1994 autobiography, "Brando—Songs My Mother Taught Me," he explains: "Except for moral and political issues that aroused in me a desire to speak out, I have done my utmost throughout my life, for the sake of my children and myself, to remain silent. ... But now, in my 70th year, I have decided to tell the story of my life ... so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture."
Impact of civil rights movement
Brando was schooled as an adolescent in a military academy, but came out against the U.S. war in Vietnam. In his autobiography, he reflects about the civil-rights movement’s great influence on his life. A number of actors, including Brando, participated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Ala., march and attended the historic 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I Have a Dream" remarks.
At a civil-rights march in Torrance, Calif., in 1963, Brando was verbally singled out by racists.
There were not too many celebrities who supported the Black Panther Party, but Brando was one of the most prominent, along with composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Brando wrote about his 1968 meeting with Panther leaders Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver and 17-year-old Bobby Hutton, the first Panther murdered by Oakland police. Brando attended Hutton’s funeral.
"Those Panthers made me realize how protected my life had been as a white person, and how, despite a lifetime of searching, curiosity and empathy, I would never understand what it was like to be Black," he wrote. Brando, along with actor Sean Penn, openly supported Panther Geronimo Ji Jaga (aka Pratt), who was imprisoned for 27 years, before his release in 1997.
For many years, Brando denounced the U.S. government for its racist treatment of Indigenous peoples. A longtime friend of Brando’s, columnist James Bacon, remarked on CNN’s "Larry King Live" on July 2 that Brando would slowly rewind John Wayne’s reactionary films to see Native people win the battles against the Cavalry.
In 1973, Brando refused to attend the Academy Awards ceremony to accept his second Oscar in protest of Hollywood’s racist portrayal of Native peoples.
His March 30 speech for that occasion reads in part, "For 200 years we have said to the Indian people who are fighting for their land, their life, their families and their right to be free: ’Lay down your arms, my friends, and then we will remain together. Only if you lay down your arms, my friends, can we then talk of peace and come to an agreement which will be good for you.’
"When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. ... We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept.
"It’s hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know."
In 1992, Brando asked that his name be removed from the credits of the movie "Christopher Columbus—The Discovery" because the final movie version did not expose the genocide of the Indigenous peoples. (MSNBC)
Over 40 years ago, Brando supported the struggle led by the Puyallup Native nation in Washington state for fishing rights.
Upon hearing of Brando’s death, SuZan Satiacum, whose late husband Chief Bob Satiacum was arrested along with Brando for defending these rights, commented: "Marlon Brando was the first person of non-color to step forward to help us. Marlon Brando was ahead of his time. ... We named the place where he was arrested ’Brando’s Landing.’ And it’s still that name yet." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer Reporter, July 3)
Forum posts
17 July 2004, 02:26
All a racist is, is a white person who wants to live in a traditional white society where whites govern themselves, as whites have done for 1,000s of years, to protect and preserve our race.
So, someone who stands up against racism is standing up against the preservation and protection of the white race.
Some hero.
19 July 2004, 22:32
There are people, like the commentor above me, who will never understand the world and life for what it is. It is not a function of their race, their culture, or even of racism. It is a function of their ignorance, which infects all of us, albeit in different ways and degrees. We are entitled to our own opinions, certainly, but not to our own facts.
Anti-racism and racism come from an extreme preoccupation with race, a preoccupation that affects those for whom civilization is much too complicated, a preoccupation arising from the denial of facts.
Marlon Brando’s stance against racism was neither self-hatred nor a betrayal of the white race, but rather an identification with humanity — and a reaction to inhumanity — at the detriment of racism, which comes from laziness. When he saw violence and injustice being committed against one racial group by another, meanwhile noting the seething bigotry that tainted all these actions, the appropriate response was taken — that of empathy and compassion, not fear nor the denial of that fear.
But there are the unfortunate few who have disconnected themselves, who have drunk themselves to blindness, and will be unable to contribute positively to this global community. They are to be noticed, while men and women like Marlon Brando are to be emulated.
Welcom Ang (Pasadena, CA)