Danny Glover’s leading role is as an activist and humanitarian

Danny Glover is not who we think he is.

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Danny Glover spoke on racial justice at the Harbor View on Monday. – Photo courtesy Black Robin Media

The popular actor, 69, is best known for his roles in action thrillers and Hollywood dramas. He also lives an alternative life as a “quasi-historian” on racial and social history and as an activist, putting his knowledge into boots-on-the-ground efforts to affect change in places from Mississippi to Haiti.

Mr. Glover talked with The Times on Monday afternoon following his appearance as a panelist at “Changing the Script: Media, Culture, and Black Lives” held at the Harbor View Hotel. He imparts no sense of ego about his success or his activist work, which includes working with employees at a Nissan plant in Mississippi, the giant automakers’ only nonunion plant in the world.

We asked him about the new form of civil rights initiatives discussed at the afternoon panel.

“There’s no question that this is an important period in our social history, but think about it. The last century in America has had significant focus on social change. Post–World War I, we entered a period of social and racial change, and an attitude of fear about the IWW [International Workers of the World] and the Red Scare, related to fears about anarchists. The time of Eugene Debs and W.E.B. Du Bois as social change leaders … From that period we went almost immediately into the civil rights movement, so the past 100 years has been a period of constant change,” said Mr. Glover.

Mr. Glover lived the 1960s period of social and racial unrest and its prevailing uneasiness, and he sees points of comparison and contrast with racial activism today. “There were as many different perspectives as there are today, from Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown at SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] to Martin Luther King’s message. But the leaders then spent hours face to face, talking, planning, strategizing. That is not available today. People communicate differently, electronically,” he said, indicating that the nuance value of face-to-face conversation has diminished.

“From a media standpoint in the Sixties and Seventies, we had the big story of the day, the Walter Cronkite moments in which the big news was heard the same way by everybody. Not so today,” said Mr. Glover. Indeed. On an Island currently chockablock with media, The Times was the only outlet to attend an event featuring high-profile players in the biggest news story of the year.

If you live long enough and pay attention, as Mr. Glover clearly has, there seems to be a centering wisdom, a déjà vu sense of the world, that evolves. “What is happening in Mississippi at that plant today is similar to the effect of America’s deindustrialization on a whole generation, many of them black, who had well-paying but low-skill jobs in Detroit auto plants,” he said.

Mr. Glover is clearly energized by the work done by this generation of activists. He is a seemingly indefatigable man, who commuted from Florida on Monday morning for the Island conference, and was preparing for an early-morning flight to California on Tuesday.

He uses his role as a famous actor to advance projects that push forward the black narrative, particularly citing his research on the Haitian freedom fight and the involvement of black Americans in John Brown’s raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal.

A somewhat disruptive vignette occurred during the interview and photo op session at Monday’s panel, and appeared as a telling tale that describes the value of Mr. Glover and, frankly, describes the work needed in our often uncivil society.

An ill-mannered white woman bulled into the interview and photo area, breathlessly announcing to Mr. Glover and an astounded gathering that her friends, who were having a drink inside, “would love to meet you and say hello,” adding triumphantly that “they are all attorneys,” certain that bit of news would seal the deal. The woman, who showed no evidence of mental impairment, clearly expected Mr. Glover, who had a bemused expression, to go with her to meet her idling pals.

He did, and returned in five minutes, resuming his work without a word about the incident. Wisdom, evidently, also breeds patience.