His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [67]
“I started with the most prolific [sic] books—I mean the kind that are easily understandable to a person like me, with a newly found job in my mind and in my heart,” he said. He read The History of Bigotry in the United States by Gustavus Myers—“a great book,” he said. He also read The American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal, a study of blacks in the United States, and Freedom Road by Howard Fast, which describes the struggles of a group of blacks after the Civil War to take their place in a society promising equal opportunity. These books made a powerful impression on Frank, who embraced their teachings on the evils of racial prejudice and promised to dedicate himself to righting social wrongs. “I’m in it for life,” he said. “After all, I’m only coming out for the basic American ideal, and who can object to that?”
Jack Keller said, “George Evans and I encouraged this newly developed social conscience, for we could see that along this road, except in the Deep South, it would certainly set Frank aside as ‘a citizen of the community’ as well as being a star. We convinced him to make a Film entitled The House I Live In, which caused a lot of people to sit up and take notice. He even received a special Academy Award for it.”
The ten-minute short, written by Albert Maitz, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and produced by RKO, was made on a nonprofit basis, all proceeds going to organizations dealing with the problems of juvenile delinquency. In the movie, Frank teaches a lesson of religious and racial tolerance to a gang of kids.
The critics applauded. “The House I Live In is a short subject to make everyone concerned feel proud,” said Variety.
“The picture’s message is tolerance. Its medium is song. And its protagonist is Frank Sinatra—the bow-tied, fan-eared, scrawny-necked idol of the bobby-soxers, who has, amazingly, grown within a few short years from a lovelorn microphone-hugging crooner to become one of filmdom’s leading and most vocal battlers for a democratic way of life,” said Cue.
“This well-meaning project … part of a larger Sinatra crusade … was staged with free help from topflight Hollywood talent. They got the idea for the picture when they learned that Sinatra had been making spontaneous visits to high schools, where he preached little sermons on tolerance. The short’s message should be clear enough to anyone,” said Time.
The success of the film led Frank to Gary, Indiana, on November 1, 1945, to try to settle a strike by the white students of Froebel High School against the “pro-Negro” policies of their new principal, who had allowed the school’s two hundred seventy black students to share classrooms with whites, to join the school orchestra, and to swim in the school pool one day a week. As a result, some one thousand white students had walked out, screaming and yelling and throwing bricks through the school windows. They refused to return as long as they had to share their facilities with the black students, and their parents supported them, fearing competition for their steel mill jobs from Gary’s growing black population. After a four-day strike, the principal was as worried as the mayor. It was at this impasse that Frank was invited to address the students in hopes that he might be able to bring them together.
George Evans and Jack Keller briefed Sinatra on what to say and accompanied him to Indiana. They were met by the mayor and escorted to the school auditorium, where more than five thousand pupils and their parents had gathered at eight o’clock in the morning.
“George and I were standing in the wings, and although we had told Frank what to say, we were skeptical and pretty damned frightened as to what might happen,” recalled Jack Keller. “Frank walked out onstage and stood dead center while all these rough, tough steel workers and their kids started catcalling and whistling