Hollywood’s Welcome Had A Chain On ItLouis Gossett Jr., 1967????????????✨
Beverly Hills Hotel.They chained Louis Gossett Jr. to a tree for 3 hours.It was 1967. 3️⃣hours. No water. No bathroom.He went on to win an Oscar.The chain⛓️????didn’t hold him. His father’s words did. “You stay right there. I’ll be right there.” He had been brought out from Brooklyn that same week to be turned into […]
Black News 
Beverly Hills Hotel.
They chained Louis Gossett Jr. to a tree for 3 hours.
It was 1967. 3⃣hours. No water. No bathroom.
He went on to win an Oscar.
The chain
didn’t hold him. His father’s words did.
“You stay right there. I’ll be right there.”
He had been brought out from Brooklyn that same week to be turned into a movie star. Hollywood’s welcome had aon it.
The Arrival:
He stepped off a flight at LAX. A limousine met him on the tarmac, sent by the William Morris Agency. His agent Ed Bondy had decided it was time. Time to make him a movie star.
The hotel suite was lavish. Dinner that night was beautiful.
He thought he would walk it off.
The Walk:
He made it about a block on the hotel grounds before a Beverly Hills police officer rolled up. There was a city ordinance, the
said, against pedestrians in residential Beverly Hills after9⃣at night.
Two more squad cars arrived. Then they put him in handcuffs & ran aaround the trunk of a tree.
Cars passing on the road behind him slowed & kept going.
He was released only when the original officer circled back, the way a man might come back to check on a stray dog he had tied up earlier & forgotten about.
That was Hollywood’s welcome.
The Drive:
The drive that delivered him to that lawn had already told him what he had walked into. The hotel was about2⃣0⃣minutes from the rental car location at Crescent Heights & Sunset.
The trip took him4⃣and a
hours.
He was pulled over6⃣or7⃣times along the way. A grown Black man, in a fancy convertible he had every right to be in, kept getting waved over. Who does the car belong to? Where do you think you’re going?
Eachran his license & let him go. Eachwas replaced bywithin a few blocks.
The Words:
In his memoir, Gossett
that he had come face-to-face with racism, & “it was an ugly sight.” He alsothat it was not going to destroy him.
By the
he made it back into his
suite, his hands were still shaking. He could not reach his agent, so he called Brooklyn instead.
His father picked up. “You stay right there. I’ll be right there,” the older man told him.
His
was3⃣0⃣0⃣0⃣miles away. There was no getting there in any way that mattered to that night.
But the words still landed.
He took off the clothes he had been chained in. He put on clean ones.
He was3⃣1⃣years old. He had already been a Broadway star for half his life.
He went on to win an Oscar. An Emmy. A Golden Globe.
Thedidn’t hold him. The words did.
Whose voice do you call when your hands are still shaking?
