Harry Belafonte, a singer, songwriter and prolific actor who began his entertainment career belting day o in his 1950s hit song banana Boat has died at the age of 96, before turning to political activism new York Times Reported on 25 April.
As a black leading figure in 1950s films exploring racial themes, Belafonte later went on to work with his friend Martin Luther King Jr. during the American Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s. He became the driving force behind the celebrity-studded, famine-fighting hit song we are the World in the 1980s.
Belafonte once said that he was in a constant state of rebellion that was fueled by anger.
“I get to be part of the rebellion that tries to change all this,” he said. new York Times in 2001. “Anger is a necessary fuel. Rebellion is healthy.”
Belafonte was born in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, but spent his early childhood in his family’s native Jamaica. Handsome and well-mannered, he became known early in his career as the “King of Calypso”. He was the first black man allowed to perform in many posh nightspots and also had racial breakthroughs in films at a time when segregation was rampant in much of the United States.
In Island in the Sun In 1954 his character entertained notions of a relationship with a white woman, played by Joan Fontaine, who allegedly threatened to burn down theaters in the American South. in 1959 odds against tomorrow Belafonte played a bank robber with a racist partner.
In the 1960s he campaigned with King, and in the 1980s he worked to end apartheid in South Africa and coordinated Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the United States.
‘we are the World’
Belafonte traveled the world in 1987 as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and later started the AIDS Foundation. In 2014, he received an Academy Award for his humanitarian work.
Belafonte provided the inspiration for we are the World, a 1985 all-star musical collaboration that raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia. After seeing a grim news report on the famine, he wanted to do something similar with a fundraising song. Do they know it’s Christmas? by British supergroup Band Aid a year earlier.
we are the World It featured superstars such as Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Diana Ross and raised millions of dollars.
“A lot of people say to me, ‘When did you decide to become an activist as an artist?'” Belafonte said in a 2011 National Public Radio interview. an artist.'”
Even in his late 80s, Belafonte was still speaking out on race and income equality and urging President Barack Obama to do more to help the poor. In January 2017 she was co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president.
Belafonte’s politics made headlines during a visit to Venezuela in January 2006, when he called President George W. Bush “the world’s biggest terrorist”. In the same month he compared the US Department of Homeland Security to the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.
On March 1, 2017, a compilation of his music was released to mark Belafonte’s 90th birthday. A few weeks before launch, Belafonte told Rolling stone The magazine said that the song was a way for him to express the injustices in the world.
“It gave me an opportunity to make political commentary, to make a social statement, to talk about things that I found distasteful — and things that I found inspiring,” he said.
Born Harold George Bellanfanti in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, he moved to Jamaica before returning to New York to attend high school.
She described her father as an abusive alcoholic who abandoned her and her mother, leaving Belafonte with a longing for a stable family. She drew strength from her mother, an illiterate domestic worker, who instilled in her a sense of activism.
Belafonte said yes, “we were instructed never to surrender, always to resist persecution.” magazine.
join the resistance
During World War II, those principles inspired him to join the Navy, which provided stability even after he left high school.
“The Navy came to me as a place of respite,” Belafonte said Yes! “… but I was also driven by the belief that Hitler must be defeated … My commitment remained after the war. Wherever I found resistance to oppression, whether in Africa, in Latin America, I certainly Naturally here in the American South, I joined that resistance.”
After the Navy, Belafonte worked as a janitor at an apartment building and as a stagehand at the American Negro Theater and studied with Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier, another leading black actor, forming a close became friends.
He also appeared on Broadway Almanacwinning a Tony Award, and in film carmen jones In 1954.
Belafonte’s third album, calypsobecame the first by a solo artist to sell over 1 million copies. banana BoatA song about Caribbean dock workers, with its resounding call day o, made her a star. Surgery to remove a node on his vocal cords in his 60s, however, reduced his voice to a hoarse whisper.
In 1959, he began producing films and produced together with Poitier buck and preacher And uptown saturday nightTea. In 1984 he produced beet streetOne of the first films about break-dancing and hip-hop culture.
Belafonte was the first black performer to win a major Emmy in 1960 with his appearance on a television variety special. He also won Grammy Awards in 1960 and 1965 and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2000, but expressed frustration at the limitation of black performers in show business. In 1994, Belafonte was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Belafonte was married three times. He and his first wife, Marguerite Byrd, had two children, including actress-model Shari Belafonte. He also had two children with second wife Julia Robinson, a former dancer.