When Leonard Bernstein partied with the Black Panthers
29 March 2018
As a special Front Row programme on Leonard Bernstein marks the centenary of his birth, we recount the fashionable soiree at the composer’s apartment in which the wealthy elite of 1970s New York mingled with members of the Black Panther Party. Here was the birth of 'radical chic'.
Leonard and Felicia Bernstein with Field Marshall Donald Cox, a leader of the Black Panther Party, at their New York penthouse apartment on 14 January 1970 | © Stephen Salmieri
On 14 January 1970, Leonard Bernstein, the famed New York Philharmonic conductor and West Side Story composer, hosted a gathering along with his wife Felicia in their apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side. In attendance were some of the wealthiest movers and shakers of the New York arts world, including Otto Preminger, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and Barbara Walters, as well as several members of the Black Panther Party.
The Black Panthers were an organisation fighting for equal rights for African-Americans, but whose radical socialist rhetoric was the cause of much concern for many Americans, and particularly the American government. FBI Director J Edgar Hoover called the Black Panther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" – for them to be invited to the home of an American celebrity was very strange indeed.
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'I have to turn this prize against itself'—John Berger on accepting the Booker Prize for Fiction, 23 November 1972
In 1972, John Berger won the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel G. He shared half of the proceeds with the Black Panthers, "the black movement with the socialist and revolutionary perspective that I find myself most in agreement with in this country". The other half funded A Seventh Man, his study of migrant workers in Europe.
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