In 1970, Leonard Bernstein and his wife were criticized for hosting a fundraiser soirée for the Black Panther Party

• In 1970, composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Montealegre hosted a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party.
• The couple faced swift backlash for their party, which journalist Tom Wolfe decried as an example of 'radical chic.'

On January 14, 1970, Felicia Montealegre, the wife of composer Leonard Bernstein, hosted what would become a highly controversial fundraiser party to support the Black Panther Party.

That evening, nearly 100 people — from wealthy socialites and celebrities to premier journalists — gathered at the Bernsteins' Park Avenue duplex to support the families of the Panther 21. In April 1969, a group of 21 members of the Black Panther Party had been charged with conspiring to kill police and bomb New York City police precincts, department stores, and other public buildings.

The Panther 21 had been held in jail for nine months without a trial or adequate resources to prepare for their defense. The Bernsteins sought to change that.

The party wasn't out of the norm for the couple. When she wasn't acting on Broadway stages or the TV screen, Montealegre engaged in social activism, including as the first chair of the Women's Division of the New York Civil Liberties Union and as a vocal supporter of the anti-war grassroots campaign Another Mother for Peace.

As for Bernstein himself, he was a longtime Democrat who often hosted civil rights leaders at parties.

"There they were, the Black Panthers from the ghetto and the black and white liberals from the middle, upper-middle and upper classes studying one another cautiously over the expensive furnishings, the elaborate flower arrangements, the cocktails and the silver trays of canapés," The New York Times reported the next day.

The party became one of the Bernsteins' most notorious episodes amid their tumultuous marriage. But the controversy was not included in the recent biopic "Maestro," directed by and starring Bradley Cooper as Bernstein (Carey Mulligan plays his wife, Montealegre).

'Radical chic'

The backlash to the idea of the liberal elite commingling with the radical Panthers was immediate and explosive. The day after the Bernsteins' event, The Times published an editorial condemning the fundraiser as representing "the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike."

"It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.," The Times' editorial board wrote.

Several months later, New York Magazine published a scathing satirical essay by Tom Wolfe, which poked fun at what Wolfe called the "radical chic" — those who supported radical causes for social gain.

The criticism came on the tails of the 1963 March on Washington and the broader Civil Rights Movement. Organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had become mainstream, and critics like Wolfe lambasted the phenomenon of white guilt and armchair agitation, which refers to someone who claims to have radical aims without taking action to realize them.

Hate mail and undercover FBI agents

The same day the Times op-ed was published, Montealegre wrote a response and delivered it personally to the newspaper's office, though it wasn't published until five days later. In it, she defended the "deeply serious purpose" behind their gathering.

"The frivolous way in which it was reported as a 'fashionable' event is unworthy of The Times, and offensive to all people who are committed to humanitarian principles of justice," Montealegre wrote.

But the damage had been done. Over the next few months, the Bernsteins received hate mail, and protestors from the Jewish Defense League picketed their house.

FBI files later revealed that the FBI, which had investigated Bernstein for years over suspected communist ties, had forged some of the hate mail and pretended they were part of the Jewish Defense League's protests.

In 1980, Bernstein said, "I have substantial evidence, now available to all, that the F.B.I. conspired to foment hatred and violent dissension among blacks, among Jews and between blacks and Jews."

A lifelong commitment to social causes

On May 13, 1971 — more than a year after the infamous fundraiser — the Panther 21 were acquitted on all counts.

The Bernsteins continued to support social causes advancing racial equity and human rights. In March 1974, Montealegre collaborated with Coretta Scott King and other lawyers and activists to co-author a report of the New York State parole system. The report criticized the parole system and called for its abolishment as an institution.

Montealegre also worked for Amnesty International in Chile, where she was raised as a child. Chile was engulfed in human rights abuses and political unrest under a military dictatorship in the 1970s.

After Montealegre died of lung cancer in 1978, Bernstein established the Felicia Montealegre Bernstein Fund of Amnesty International USA to continue providing support for human rights activists in her memory.