Artist-cum-activist Harry Belafonte is slated to deliver a keynote address Monday as part of the College's 2007 Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration.
Belafonte, who spoke at Duke University's celebration last year, sparked controversy over his remarks regarding President Bush. While at Duke, he compared the war in Iraq to September 11th, and defended his support of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
"What is the essential difference in quality of our humanity for those who would do the cruel and tragic deed of flying an airplane into a building and killing 3,000 innocent Americans and those who would lie and lead the nation into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands?" Belafonte said. "Excuse me, fellow citizens, if the line for me becomes a little blurred."
In 2002, Belafonte refferred to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell as a house slave in the Bush administration, a view he also said applied to Condoleezza Rice.
History professor Judith Byfield and women's studies professor Giavanna Munafo, co-heads of the College's Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee, defended their selection. They said Belafonte was selected because of his role during the civil rights movement, and also because his profession fit with the celebration's art-related theme, "Lift Every Voice."
"Every year we choose someone and not everyone is going to like them," said Munafo, who works in the Department of Institutional Diversity.
Munafo said that a liberal arts college should bring a diversity of speakers to events.
"King spoke out too. Not everyone supported him or the issues that he raised," Byfield said, nothing that King opposed the Vietnam War. "We don't invite people just because we don't have the entire campus's consensus."
Munafo said that the committee has received many e-mails about the choice of Belafonte, and the majority of them supported the decision.
Joseph Malchow '08 said that he felt that Belafonte's rhetoric does not constitute "civil discourse," the type of speech he says those who attended the Fall term rally desire.
"Harry Belafonte, the man who called Colin Powell a slave, is flatly incivil," Malchow wrote on his blog. "Pursuant to the standards set out by the civility rally, under those standards then he should not speak"
Onyi Kanu '09 said that because of Belafonte's activist past and his role as King's confidant, he is an appropriate speaker for the occasion. She believes Belafonte thinks he's exercising free speech in the same way that King and Malcom X did. Kanu defended the College's choice.
"We will think that he is racist, but he is thinking about all the struggles of the time period. It's not that you can just label him racist," Kanu said.
Belafonte's accomplishments as an artist and activist include an Emmy Award, a Tony Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize and the Nelson Mandela Courage Award. He may be best known for writing the the "Banana Boat Song," and he is also the organizer of the "We are the World" song. Millions of dollars of profit from the song went toward famine relief in Africa. He served as a cultural adviser for the Peace Corps and a goodwill ambassador to UNICEF.