"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven." Matthew 6:1

Proverbs 3:27 (The words of Solomon) "Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the power of thine hand to do it"

After working on this a while, one gets the feeling that Johnny Mathis has no desire to be in the limelight any longer than he has to! It kind of suggests an unfortunate career choice, but I think (and hope) he learned long ago that curiosity is price one pays for choosing such a profession. Besides, I feel it's worth some effort to give people some idea as to the things Johnny Mathis has done as a way of "giving back" to the world in general. (How I hate that terminology; to give back implies that one has taken something. I personally feel that if a performer has given a stellar performance, either on stage or on record, and his customer feels he has gotten his money's worth for that performance, then the performer has paid in full, his account settled, and there is nothing left to "give back". But I'll move on.)

"I was very lucky," Mathis will say. He is well aware of the advantages he has had that other Blacks in and out of show business have had. Mathis has had white friends all his life. Even Mathis' father, Clem Mathis, has said in a magazine interview, "Johnny has always gotten help from white people."

It's one of those things he'd just as soon not talk about, and it's this sort of noncommittal stance that kind of rankles a lot of Blacks. But it's not as if he's not aware. He's had a "man in a bubble" existence for a lot of years, I think, but he knows well what's been going on. For a while, he was part of it.

In any civil war such as that between the races during the 60's, and some say continue even to this day, you have your generals, and you have your infantry, those who would die for the cause, and you have those who finance these military operations. Johnny Mathis chose to be in the latter group, for as he used to say, "I don't think anybody'd pay a dime to watch me fight dogs and hoses, but they'll pay to hear me sing" So as his predominantly white audiences paid to hear him sing, he rechannelled a lot of those funds to the major civil rights causes of that time period, like SNCC, NAACP.

But you won't hear about such things from Mathis. So I feel it's up to me, a Black woman, to inform the Internet presence of these and other things, if he will not do it himself.

Money doesn't shield anyone from the Black experience, and believe it or not, Mathis is no exception. Here are some of the things he has done in order to better the lives of someone other than himself: