Belafonte, Bennett, and Bennett’s wife, Susan Benedetto, laughed together at Belafonte’s 2007 birthday party. Back in 1965, Belafonte recruited Bennett to march in the Selma march. Belafonte told CNN in 2013 that King asked him to recruit artists to the civil rights movement and that Bennett was one of his first calls.
“I said I’m not, I’m walking away from all this,” Bennett remembered to the outlet at the time. “This is just insane, it’s so ignorant and but then he told me what went down, what was going down how some blacks were burned, had gasoline thrown on them and they were burned. When I heard that I said ‘I’ll go with you.’ You know I just realized that this is insanity.”