Article: "Why Marlon Brando Quits Film Role for Civil Rights", 1968

March 21, 2026

“Why Marlon Brando Quits Film Role for Civil Rights”

from Jet Magazine, May 1968, by Louie Robinson

In the aftermath of the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. one of the most total commitments made to Dr. King’s work by anyone came from Academy Award winning actor Marlon Brando.

Front page of the Magazine

White, wealthy and at the very top of his profession, 44-year-old Brando would seem to have the most to lose and the least to gain by such an involvement. Yet, shortly after Dr. King’s death, Brando announced that he was bowing out of the lead role of a major film (The Arrangement) about to being production and would now devote himself to the civil rights movement. “I felt I’d better go find out where it is; what it is to be black in this country; what this rage is all about”, Brando said on the late night ABC-TV Joey Bishop Show. Furthermore he declared: “If the vacuum formed by Dr. King’s death isn’t filled with concern and understanding and a measure of love, then I think we all are really going to be lost here in this country.” Time, as well as hope, has run out said Brando.

The actor’s involvement in the black man’s civil rights was not born upon the death of Dr. King, however. In the early 1960s he contributes thousands of dollars to both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and to a scholarship established for the children of slain Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers. By then he was already involved in films that carried a people-to-people message: “Sayonara”, which told interracial romance, and the “The Ugly American“, which told of the conduct of American officials abroad and its effect on residents of foreign countries.

Outside of his film work, Brando not only appeared before the California assembly in support of a state fair housing law, but personally joined picket lines in anti-discrimination demonstrations at housing developments.

Pictures from inside the magazine

When did Brando first become involved in the Black American’s struggle for equality? “When it first started, I suppose,” says Nebraska-born Brando. “When this Black American woman in the South, Mrs. Rosa Parks, decided she wasn’t going to sit in the back of the bus anymore. From that moment on, I think things began to change. It’s very difficult to tell when you suddenly find yourself in a movement in thought.

Pictures from inside the magazine

“I think that there are many Black Americans now, just as there are still many white people, who are not awakened to what is happening, very few people understand what the nature of this movement is. James Baldwin, I suppose, articulated it as well as anybody.

“I don’t know when it began for me, but I know that the end can be won only when there is hard legislation that supports all of the issues that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the NAACP and CORE people have set down.”

In 1963, during a tour of black nations abroad, U.S. Sen. Allen Ellender of Louisiana declared he had never found any black people who were capable of self-government. Brando had done his film “The Ugly American” and then, offered this comment:

Pictures from inside the magazine

“One of the amusing things about this country and many of its leaders, such as Senator Ellender, is the fact that they are always talking about the under-educated world and the under-educated Black American; that he is not suited to govern himself because he is under-educated but to my way of thinking, the Black American is an over-educated person. Perhaps technical knowledge and a fair opportunity have not been offered to him, but he knows the meaning of democracy better than most Americans. He knows the meaning of the bill of rights and what civil rights mean. He knows what the spirit of this country is as it was constitutionally written because he has had so little of it extended to him. I think that his knowledge of what is really useful and meaningful about our principles of government is infinitely greater than that of any corresponding white group.

“Now Sen. Ellender is an under-educated fellow. He perhaps has a lot of information, but that’s not knowledge, that’s not education, even though it so often passes as that.

Pictures from inside the magazine

“I think we are getting the best education that this country has had since its inception. Of course, it isn’t being recorded as that. It seems to me that a significant part of the press looks upon the Black American and this whole movement as entirely self-serving in motive. But I was surprised to find the number of non-Black Americans actively involved in these civil rights issues. This is fundamentally a democratic and humanistic movement, and certainly it is not, by any means, localized to the Black American interest.”

In the face of what Brando sees as a lack of any “important massive legislation” to aid in housing, welfare, education, job training and subsidies, the actor is spark-plugging a “1 percent of income” fund-raising campaign, in which Americans can help Black Americans and all other underprivileged persons by contributing 1 percent of their annual income to the SCLC in Atlanta. Brando, who earns an estimated million dollars yearly, has already contributed 10 percent of his annual pay to the cause. Others who have made or pledged 1 percent or more include, Brando announced, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Joan Crawford, Drew Pearson, Troy Donahue, Tony Franciosa, Carl Reiner, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. “If we don’t do something about it now,” Brando said of America’s racial dilemma, “it’s not going to be worth going home one of these days.”

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