Stardom’s a Lethal Weapon for Good in Danny Glover’s Hands

There’s no entourage nipping at his heels, no burly bodyguard, just a regular Joe strolling the street--except that, of course, he isn’t, but it’s easy to forget that.

Which means that the homeless dudes in Dupont Circle feel free to hit him up with their requests: This one could use an autograph. That one could use a little cash. The one with the pants sliding south could use his San Francisco Giants baseball cap. Perhaps deferring to the royal burnish of celebrity, they’re unfailingly polite. Please. If I could trouble you for just a minute. Thank you, Mr. Glover.

So that one gets the autograph, the other one gets a few bucks, but no, man, you can’t have his baseball cap. And, brother, could you hold off for just a minute? Please. He’s busy right now.

Mr. Glover is taking a meeting.

This is what Danny Glover, star of “The Royal Tenenbaums” and the “Lethal Weapon” movie series, does these days: He takes meetings, though usually not with slick studio execs but with death penalty abolitionists, environmental activists, literacy advocates, human rights workers and those seeking to eradicate AIDS in Africa.

He’s a man in transition, trafficking in the glitz of celluloid but feeling duty-bound to rescue the world, particularly Africa and other parts of the globe inhabited by folks of African descent. So he exists on five hours of sleep, rising at dawn and sneaking in naps so he can wring more time out of his overstuffed day for his many projects.

Since October, much of his attention is focused on his duties as chairman of TransAfrica Forum. The 22-year-old think tank, founded by anti-apartheid activist and scholar Randall Robinson, was on life support before Glover bailed it out in 1999 with a $1-million pledge, says Bill Fletcher, a labor activist who became its president in January.

He’s doing more than writing checks. He’s helping rebuild an organization that’s struggling after the departure of its charismatic founder. As Glover sees it, his role at TransAfrica is a “supportive” one, trying to rebuild an organization and figure out how to push African Americans front and center into the dialogue about the future of Africa and the African diaspora, including those in South America and the Caribbean--what Glover calls the “Global South.”

All these meetings, all the planning and strategizing, make Danny Glover one very busy man. If acting gets pushed to the background, so be it. Time on the set is fun time, self-indulgent time, basically vacation time. Of course, filming can’t halt the deluge of faxes and e-mails he gets.

He ambles into the new offices of TransAfrica, running a little late, looking a little weary and lugging a tote bag stuffed with six books, a Washington Post, yesterday’s New York Times, bottles of vitamins, a DVD of one of his more forgettable flicks and a couple of Chucho Valdes CDs. The aforementioned Giants cap covers his salt-speckled crop; jeans and a T-shirt cover his 6-foot, 4-inch frame. A navy Yohji Yamamoto jacket, tricked up with pleated sleeves like something out of “Star Trek,” is his only concession to fashion. Yamamoto, he says, knows from big men, and Glover is a man who occupies space.

His voice is a bass-line rasp, mixing and mingling with Fletcher’s low-key murmur as the two outline their plans for the reconfigured TransAfrica.

The Issues Aren’t Easily

Distilled Into Sound Bites

The men are friends, veteran activists who came of age during the civil rights movement. They met a couple of years ago, on a TransAfrica-sponsored trip to Cuba. Now they talk several times a week, plotting and planning, determined to take the organization to a different level. Instead of lobbying politicians for dispensation for Africa, they want to lobby African Americans.

In many ways, TransAfrica mirrors the trajectory of the civil rights movement. There was a time when the direction was clear: State-sponsored segregation was wrong, whether the apartheid was in the South or in South Africa.

But now, in this post-civil rights, post-Cold War, post-Nelson Mandela era, the issues aren’t so easily distilled into sound bites and images.

There’s also the matter of Robinson, who has retired to St. Kitts, where his wife is from, and has written his latest book, “The Reckoning,” about the intricate relationship of crime and poverty, prison and politics. His was the face of TransAfrica, from his well-publicized hunger strikes on behalf of Haitian refugees to his quest for reparations to his lobbying of “pro-justice” political figures.

Now, with Robinson gone, changes are being made. The organization recently sold its Dupont Circle mansion for $5.2 million and paid cash for its new headquarters, a 5,000-square-foot condo in another Dupont Circle mansion that’s been converted into a multi-use facility.

Fletcher and Glover both say they want a grass-roots movement: They want to engage African Americans in the drive for reparations for the descendants of American slaves, to promote debt relief for African nations, to rebuild a network of support within organized labor and to halt the disaster AIDS is wreaking throughout Africa.

Amid all the goals are prosaic concerns: There’s money to be raised, boxes to be unpacked at the new office and an image to rebuild in the post-Randall Robinson era, all the while making sure the institution stays afloat.

Glover is now the public face of TransAfrica, meeting with heads of African states, raising money and giving speeches on college campuses.

“I’m very careful about his time,” Fletcher says. “When you have the level of stature and fame that Danny has, everyone wants a piece of him.”

“When I believe in something,” Glover says, “I have a sense of justice in my beliefs.”

Still, it’s a sense of self-righteousness peppered with a dogged sense of inadequacy. “Sometimes I think I don’t speak up enough. Sometimes I feel that I’m not doing enough.”

Some saw him as doing and speaking too much last November, when Glover spoke out against the death penalty during a panel at Princeton University. A student asked him if he would spare the life of Osama bin Laden; Glover responded that he was opposed to the death penalty in all instances. A furor ensued, with conservatives like Oliver North calling for a boycott of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The Modesto City Council withdrew its sponsorship of Glover as the featured speaker for its Martin Luther King Day celebration. After a write-in campaign by Glover supporters, the City Council reversed its decision, and Glover spoke after all.

It was the first time, perhaps, that the actor, who normally enjoys positive press, was pilloried for his politics. “I was angry.”

Glover uses Hollywood as a springboard to riskier, more independent endeavors. To do “Lethal Weapon 3,” he negotiated with Warner Bros. to donate $3 million toward the making of “The Saint of Fort Washington,” an independent film in which he plays a homeless man.

“I was able to feel that I got something; I changed the dynamic. It’s a give-and-take. Maybe I can get them to do a story that I want to make. If you’re fortunate to get to a certain point in the business, you can do that.”