Harry Belafonte, the civil rights and leisure large who started as a groundbreaking actor and singer and have become an activist, humanitarian and conscience of the world, has died. He was 96.
Belafonte died Tuesday of congestive coronary heart failure at his New York dwelling, his spouse Pamela by his facet, mentioned publicist Ken Sunshine.
With his glowing, good-looking face and silky-husky voice, Belafonte was one of many first Black performers to achieve a large following on movie and to promote one million data as a singer; many nonetheless know him for his signature hit Banana Boat Song (Day-O), and its name of “Day-O! Daaaaay-O.” But he solid a larger legacy as soon as he scaled again his performing profession within the Sixties and lived out his hero Paul Robeson’s decree that artists are “gatekeepers of truth.”
Belafonte stands because the mannequin and the epitome of the movie star activist. Few saved up along with his time and dedication and none his stature as a gathering level amongst Hollywood, Washington and the civil rights motion.
Belafonte not solely participated in protest marches and profit concert events, however helped manage and lift help for them. He labored intently along with his pal and generational peer the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., typically intervening on his behalf with each politicians and fellow entertainers and serving to him financially.
He risked his life and livelihood and set excessive requirements for youthful Black celebrities, scolding Jay-Z and Beyoncé for failing to satisfy their “social responsibilities,” and mentoring Usher, Common, Danny Glover and plenty of others. In Spike Lee’s 2018 movie BlacKkKlansman, he was fittingly solid as an elder statesman education younger activists in regards to the nation’s previous.
Belafonte’s pal, civil rights chief Andrew Young, would notice that Belafonte was the uncommon particular person to develop extra radical with age. He was ever engaged and unyielding, keen to tackle Southern segregationists, Northern liberals, the billionaire Koch brothers and the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whom Belafonte would bear in mind asking to chop him “some slack.”
Belafonte responded, “What makes you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?”
Belafonte had been a serious artist because the Fifties. He received a Tony Award in 1954 for his starring function in John Murray Anderson’s Almanac and 5 years later grew to become the primary Black performer to win an Emmy for the TV particular Tonight with Harry Belafonte.
In 1954, he co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge within the Otto Preminger-directed musical Carmen Jones, a preferred breakthrough for an all-Black solid. The 1957 film Island within the Sun was banned in a number of Southern cities, the place theatre homeowners had been threatened by the Ku Klux Klan due to the movie’s interracial romance between Belafonte and Joan Fontaine.
His Calypso, launched in 1955, grew to become the primary formally licensed million-selling album by a solo performer, and began a nationwide infatuation with Caribbean rhythms (Belafonte was nicknamed, reluctantly, the “King of Calypso”). Admirers of Belafonte included a younger Bob Dylan, who debuted on file within the early ’60s by enjoying harmonica on Belafonte’s Midnight Special.
“Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it,” Dylan later wrote. “Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you.”
Belafonte befriended King within the spring of 1956 after the younger civil rights chief known as and requested for a gathering. They spoke for hours, and Belafonte would bear in mind feeling King raised him to the “higher plane of social protest.” Then on the peak of his singing profession, Belafonte was quickly producing a profit live performance for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that helped make King a nationwide determine. By the early Sixties, he had determined to make civil rights his precedence.
“I was having almost daily talks with Martin,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir My Song, revealed in 2011. “I realized that the movement was more important than anything else.”
The Kennedys had been among the many first politicians to hunt his opinions, which he willingly shared. John F. Kennedy, at a time when Black voters had been as prone to help Republicans as they might Democrats, was so anxious for his help that throughout the 1960 election he visited Belafonte at his Manhattan dwelling. Belafonte defined King’s significance and organized for King and Kennedy to satisfy.
“I was quite taken by the fact that he (Kennedy) knew so little about the Black community,” Belafonte instructed NBC in 2013. “He knew the headlines of the day, but he wasn’t really anywhere nuanced or detailed on the depth of Black anguish or what our struggle’s really about.”
Belafonte would typically criticize the Kennedys for his or her reluctance to problem the Southern segregationists who had been then a considerable a part of the Democratic Party. He argued with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, over the federal government’s failure to guard the “Freedom Riders” making an attempt to combine bus stations. He was among the many Black activists at a broadly publicized assembly with the lawyer common, when playwright Lorraine Hansberry and others surprised Kennedy by questioning whether or not the nation even deserved Black allegiance.
“Bobby turned red at that. I had never seen him so shaken,” Belafonte later wrote.
In 1963, Belafonte was deeply concerned with the historic March on Washington. He recruited his shut pal Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and different celebrities and persuaded the left-wing Marlon Brando to co-chair the Hollywood delegation with the extra conservative Charlton Heston, a pairing designed to enchantment to the broadest attainable viewers. In 1964, he and Poitier personally delivered tens of 1000’s of greenback to activists in Mississippi after three “Freedom Summer” volunteers had been murdered — the 2 celebrities had been chased by automotive at one level by members of the KKK. The following 12 months, he introduced in Tony Bennett, Joan Baez and different singers to carry out for the marchers in Selma, Alabama.
When King was assassinated, in 1968, Belafonte helped pick the swimsuit he was buried in, sat subsequent to his widow, Coretta, on the funeral, and continued to help his household, partly by way of an insurance coverage coverage he had taken out on King in his lifetime.
“Much of my political outlook was already in place when I encountered Dr. King,” Belafonte later wrote. “I was well on my way and utterly committed to the civil rights struggle. I came to him with expectations and he affirmed them.”
King’s demise left Belafonte remoted from the civil rights neighborhood. He was turned off by the separatist beliefs of Stokely Carmichael and different “Black Power” activists and had little chemistry with King’s designated successor, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. But the entertainer’s causes prolonged nicely past the U.S.
He helped introduce South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba to American audiences, the 2 profitable a Grammy in 1964 for the live performance file An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba. He coordinated Nelson Mandela’s first go to to the U.S. since being launched from jail in 1990. A number of years earlier, he had initiated the all-star, million-selling We Are the World recording, the Grammy-winning charity music for famine reduction in Africa.
Belafonte’s adolescence and profession paralleled these of Poitier, who died in 2022. Both spent a part of their childhoods within the Caribbean and ended up in New York. Both served within the navy throughout World War II, acted within the American Negro Theatre after which broke into movie. Poitier shared his perception in civil rights, however nonetheless devoted a lot of his time to appearing, a supply of some rigidity between them. While Poitier had a sustained and historic run within the Sixties as a number one man and field workplace success, Belafonte grew bored with appearing and turned down elements he thought to be “neutered.″
“Sidney radiated a truly saintly dignity and calm. Not me,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t want to tone down my sexuality, either. Sidney did that in every role he took.″
Belafonte was very much a human being. He acknowledged extra-marital affairs, negligence as a parent and a frightening temper, driven by lifelong insecurity. “Woe to the musician who missed his cue, or the agent who fouled up a booking,″ he confided.
In his memoir, he chastised Poitier for a “radical breach″ by backing out on a commitment to star as Mandela in a TV miniseries Belafonte had conceived, then agreeing to play Mandela for a rival production. He became so estranged from King’s widow and children that he was not asked to speak at her funeral. He later sued three of King’s children over control of some of the civil rights leader’s personal papers, and would allege that the family was preoccupied with “selling trinkets and memorabilia.”
He made information years earlier when he in contrast Colin Powell, the primary Black secretary of state, to a slave “permitted to come into the house of the master” for his service within the George W. Bush administration. He was in Washington in January 2009 as Obama was inaugurated, officiating together with Baez and others at a gala known as the Inaugural Peace Ball. But Belafonte would later criticize Obama for failing to reside as much as his promise and missing “fundamental empathy with the dispossessed, be they white or Black.”
Belafonte did sometimes serve in authorities, as cultural adviser for the Peace Corps throughout the Kennedy administration and many years later as goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. For his movie and music profession, he obtained the movement image academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, a National Medal of Arts, a Grammy for lifetime achievement and quite a few different honorary prizes. He discovered particular pleasure in profitable a New York Film Critics Award in 1996 for his work as a gangster in Robert Altman’s “Kansas City.”
“I’m as proud of that film critics’ award as I am of all my gold records,” he wrote in his memoir.
He was married 3 times, most not too long ago to photographer Pamela Frank, and had 4 youngsters. Three of them — Shari, David and Gina — grew to become actors. He can also be survived by two stepchildren and eight grandchildren.
Harry Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in 1927, in Harlem. His father was a seaman and cook dinner with Dutch and Jamaican ancestry and his mom, half Scottish, labored as a home. Both dad and mom had been undocumented immigrants and Belafonte recalled residing “an underground life, as criminals of a kind, on the run.″
The family was violent: Belafonte sustained brutal beatings from his father, and he was despatched to reside for a number of years with kinfolk in Jamaica. Belafonte was a poor reader — he was most likely dyslexic, he later realized — and dropped out of highschool, quickly becoming a member of the Navy. While within the service, he learn Color and Democracy by the Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and was deeply affected, calling it the beginning of his political schooling.
After the conflict, he discovered a job in New York as an assistant janitor for some condo buildings. One tenant appreciated him sufficient to provide him free tickets to a play on the American Negro Theatre, a neighborhood repertory for black performers. Belafonte was so impressed that he joined as a volunteer, then as an actor. Poitier was a peer, each of them “skinny, brooding and susceptible inside our arduous shells of self-protection,″ Belafonte later wrote.
Belafonte met Brando, Walter Matthau and different future stars whereas taking appearing lessons on the New School for Social Research. Brando was an inspiration as an actor, and he and Belafonte grew to become shut, typically using on Brando’s bike or double relationship or enjoying congas collectively at events. Over the years, Belafonte’s political and inventive lives would result in friendships with everybody from Frank Sinatra and Lester Young to Eleanor Roosevelt and Fidel Castro.
His early stage credit included Days of Our Youth and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Peacock, a play Belafonte remembered much less due to his personal efficiency than due to a backstage customer, Robeson, the actor, singer and activist.
“What I bear in mind greater than something Robeson mentioned, was the love he radiated, and the profound duty he felt, as an actor, to make use of his platform as a bully pulpit,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir. His friendship with Robeson and help for left-wing causes finally introduced bother from the federal government. FBI brokers visited him at dwelling and allegations of Communism practically price him an look on The Ed Sullivan Show. Leftists suspected, and Belafonte emphatically denied, that he had named names of suspected Communists so he might carry out on Sullivan’s present.
By the Fifties, Belafonte was additionally singing, discovering gigs on the Blue Note, the Vanguard and different golf equipment — he was backed for one efficiency by Charlie Parker and Max Roach — and changing into immersed in folks, blues, jazz and the calypso he had heard whereas residing in Jamaica. Starting in 1954, he launched such prime 10 albums as Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites and Belafonte, and his standard singles included Mathilda, Jamaica Farewell and The Banana Boat Song, a reworked Caribbean ballad that was a late addition to his Calypso file.
“We discovered ourselves one or two songs brief, so we threw in Day-O as filler,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir.
He was a celebrity, however one criticized, and infrequently sued, for taking conventional materials and never sharing the income. Belafonte expressed remorse and likewise frightened about being typecast as a calypso singer, declining for years to sing Day-O reside after he gave tv performances towards banana boat backdrops.
Belafonte was the uncommon younger artist to consider the enterprise facet of present enterprise. He began one of many first all-Black music publishing corporations. He produced performs, films and TV reveals, together with Off-Broadway’s To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, in 1969. He was the primary Black particular person to supply for TV.
Belafonte made historical past in 1968 by filling in for Johnny Carson on the Tonight present for a full week. Later that 12 months, a easy, spontaneous gesture led to a different milestone. Appearing on a taped TV particular starring Petula Clark, Belafonte joined the British singer on the anti-war music On the Path of Glory. At one level, Clark positioned a hand on Belafonte’s arm. The present’s sponsor, Chrysler, demanded the phase be reshot. Clark and Belafonte resisted, efficiently, and for the primary time a white lady touched a Black man’s arm on primetime tv.
In the Seventies, he returned to film appearing, co-starring with Poitier in Buck and the Preacher, a industrial flop, the raucous and standard comedy Uptown Saturday Night. His different movie credit embody Bobby, White Man’s Burden, made cameos in Altman’s The Player and Ready to Wear, and appeared within the Altman-directed TV collection Tanner on Tanner. In 2011, HBO aired a documentary about Belafonte, Sing Your Song.
Mindful to the tip that he grew up in poverty, Belafonte didn’t consider himself as an artist who grew to become an activist, however an activist who occurred to be an artist.
“When you develop up, son,″ Belafonte remembered his mom telling him, “by no means go to mattress at night time figuring out that there was one thing you possibly can have executed throughout the day to strike a blow towards injustice and also you didn’t do it.″
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Former Associated Press author Mike Stewart contributed to this report.