Responding to the racial injustices in Selma, Alabama, the Broadway community banded together at the Majestic Theater for a fundraiser. Only one month earlier, a peaceful march in Selma was interrupted by a brutal attack leaving the black marchers bloodied and severely injured. The marchers hoped to bring attention to the continued violations of their Constitutional rights in Alabama. Tickets for the event ranged from $5 to $1,000.
Actor Martin Sheen participated and told Hollywood Today
his memories of the evening. “In 1965, I was on Broadway at that time doing a play and Selma, Alabama erupted, and we wanted so desperately to answer that, and so we created a show on Broadway, that is all the people on Broadway, called Broadway Answers Selma. And it was a huge benefit on one of our dark nights and it was hosted by Sammy Davis Jr., who was on Broadway at that time during Golden Boy
... ”
The collection of performers was impressive! From A to W, some of the biggest names who participated were Carol Burnett, Carol Channing, Sydney Chaplin (Barbra's costar in Funny Girl), Barbara Cook, Ruby Dee, Sir John Gielgud, Ethel Merman, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Walter Matthau, and Chita Rivera.
Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. received two standing ovations that evening – once when he took his seat at the top of the show, and again when a performer on the stage introduced him as “the right man in the right place at the right moment in history.”
Barbra Streisand sang Harold Arlen's “That's A Fine Kind of Freedom” close to the end of the second act. Martin Charnin (the musical
Annie) collaborated with Arlen on the song, writing the lyrics. According to Charnin, they wrote the song specifically for the evening – Streisand didn't want to sing her usual standards like “People,” but instead wanted a song that addressed the gravity of what was happening. Indeed, “That's A Fine Kind of Freedom” (which you can hear on Barbra's 1969 album
What About Today) was a powerful song:
Bird up above see what he's got
The freedom to fly and the freedom to not
Dee dum, that's a fine kind o' freedom
Fly where he like, like where he fly
Don't have to go to the back of the sky
Dee dum, that's a fine kind o' freedom ...
For the Selma
performance, Barbra wore a turtleneck dress made of jersey material. She told columnist Earl Wilson, “I asked my designer to make me a turtleneck sweater, but when you come to the end of the sweater, not to stop.”
The evening raised over $150,000 for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which would circulate the money to the families of Reverend Reeb, who was murdered by white segregationists in Selma, and Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten by Alabama state troopers during the peaceful voting rights march. More funds would go to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
