Kindred Spirit

Then, in 1954, in San Bernardino, Calif., Sammy crashed his Cadillac. At the hospital, an eye had to be removed. Acquaintances feared the end of his act. Would he be able to judge the distance to the edge of the stage with just one eye? Would his peripheral vision be ruined?

His comeback show was at Ciro's, the famed nightclub. Hundreds of celebrities came out. And he wowed everyone. The trade publication Variety would gush: "It was Sammy Davis Jr.'s night. The lad who lost an eye came back in whirlwind style."

He wasn't Harry Belafonte handsome, so some thought he wouldn't get the opportunity to do movies. But there he was, first in "Anna Lucasta" in 1959, doing solid work, then later that year in "Porgy and Bess," playing Sportin' Life and stealing the movie from Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge.

He dreamed of the Great White Way, but many wondered if his nightclub act could sustain a Broadway show. "Mr. Wonderful" opened in 1956 and the critics laughed, but his fans couldn't stay away. The show ran for more than a year. "Golden Boy" opened on Broadway in 1964. (His technical adviser was Sugar Ray Robinson.) His critics said the role required dramatic skills he didn't possess. It ran for more than a year and a half.

He had an overbite, a pronounced nose, and the glass eye. In the 1960s his wife was May Britt, the beautiful Swedish actress.

Nothing seemed to delight him as much as being summoned to Washington. At the White House, Sammy slept in the bedroom of the Great Emancipator. President Nixon wanted to send him to Vietnam on a fact-finding mission.

But his boundless optimism didn't overcome everything. Some black radicals bedeviled him. Klan members weighed in with threatening missives. "You'd just like to look like everybody else so that people wouldn't automatically start hating you a block away," Sammy once told writer Alex Haley. "White cat sees you walking down the street, maybe from across the street, and he never saw you before in his life, and he's not even close enough to distinguish anything about you except that you're not his color -- and just for that, right there, snap, bop, bap, he hates you! That's the injustice of it, that's what makes you cry out inside, sometimes, 'Damn, I wish I wasn't black!' "

As much as possible, Sammy steered clear of the Deep South. Not so the crooner Nat King Cole.

Cole -- born in Alabama but raised in Chicago -- was a child prodigy who formed a 14-piece band while still a teenager. His Nat King Cole Trio toured the country, drawing new admirers from nightclub to nightclub.

In time Cole had a string of velvety songs that became popular across America, humming on jukeboxes and in living rooms and basements. Husbands and wives and young couples swayed to "Ramblin' Rose," "The Christmas Song," "Sweet Lorraine" and "Mona Lisa."

In April 1956 Cole was booked into the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium in Alabama. He was giddy about returning to the state where he was born. This would be proof of his crossing over. But many in Alabama still bitterly opposed the 1954 Brown school desegregation ruling. Told there might be some kind of demonstration by segregationists against his concert appearance, Cole flicked away the warning. Optimism was his armor. But just into Cole's third number, a white man bolted from the back of the auditorium toward the stage. Within seconds a half dozen members of the White Citizens Council were attacking Cole, with fans screaming. Police rushed in to make arrests. Cole was left bloodied and wincing from an injured back.

"We were warned that there was going to be trouble," Lee Young, Cole's drummer, once confided to an interviewer, "but most musicians are very positive people."