Bob Dylan
Template:TOCnestleft Bob Dylan
Communist youth festival benefit
Bobbie Rabinowitz was at the 1962 Soviet front World Federation of Democratic Youth Festival in Helsinki, Finland.
The Festival committee organized a fundraiser at the Village Gate. The program included Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Odetta and Bob Dylan, "all before they were nationally known, and all singing to support the Festival! We raised enough funds to send a cultural contingent on scholarship. Over 400 youth from all over the US attended the Helsinki Festival." They are lurking everywhere still! I can think of "some now prominent folks who were on that Festival contingent, including NAACP chair Julian Bond and Bernice Reagon, who founded Sweet Honey in the Rock. It is part of history that there was an attempt to have a "counter" US delegation at Helsinki, whose role was to disrupt. This delegation, composed mainly of Yale students,was funded by the CIA. Which goes to show you that "dirty tricks" were alive and well in 1962."[1]
March on Washington
The March on Washington brought sharecroppers and college students, housewives and clergy, factory workers and school teachers from every part of the country. It attracted big-name celebrities, including actors Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Ossie Davis, Dihann Carroll and Charlton Heston, singers Harry Belafonte, Bobby Darin, Josephine Baker, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis, Jr., athletes Jackie Robinson and Bill Russell and writer James Baldwin. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, opera star Marian Anderson and folk singers Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Odetta, and Peter, Paul and Mary performed for the vast crowd.[2]