He stood on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. He held court in Ferguson as protests gave our region an international spotlight. For the past seven decades, the contributions of Harry Belafonte the social justice warrior have been as revered as his unparalleled film, stage and music career. For the next chapters of equity-driven humanitarian work and activism, Belafonte will be present in spirit alone – as an ancestor.
The award-winning activist/actor/singer/producer/director passed away on Tuesday, April 25 from congestive heart failure. He was 96.
“I’m heartbroken at hearing of the death of Harry Belafonte, a true mentor and friend,” Rev. Al Sharpton said via Twitter. “I cherished the time he would give me and others to guide us and correct us. He was a history changing activist, a culture changing entertainer, and an unmatched intellectual.”
Not even the systemic racism that crippled the careers of so many – including his Carmen Jones co-star Dorothy Dandridge –could stifle Belafonte’s impact or dim his light, mainly because activism was at the core of his art and his life.
During the height of his fame, Belafonte was one of the biggest stars the world had seen, before or since. He created a blueprint for leveraging commercial success as a popular artist to fuel one’s passion as a change agent.
“It wasn’t easy for me, because I was an activist who became an artist – not an artist who became an activist,” Belafonte told PBS NewsHour in 2011. “My activism really started the day of my birth. By the time I came upon the idea of being an artist, I brought with me this mission of activism.”
As an activist, Belafonte helped organize the 1963 March on Washington – and was a close friend and confidant of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was immersed in the work of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and spent decades fighting for the liberation of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. He galvanized the music industry’s biggest stars to form supergroup USA for Africa and record “We are the World” in 1985. The chart-topping single raised more than $60M (more than $156M in today’s dollars) in the fight against world hunger. Belafonte served as an ambassador for UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) for the last 36 years of his life. The list of organizations, initiatives and worthy causes to which he gifted his influence are too vast to individually mention.
Belafonte the artist was a seismic force that changed the way the world saw Black people depicted. He used his natural magnetism to attract audiences first to his art, and then to his cause.
He was offensively good looking, so talented that it seemed unfair – and so charming it was impossible to harbor jealousy for him being so handsome and talented. “I was a good singer, but I wasn’t the best,” Belafonte wrote in his 2011 book My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance. “I had known from the start I would have to rely on my acting. And in the end, I could make a case that I was the greatest actor in the world. I had convinced everyone in the world that I could sing.”
His gifts and on screen presence were criminally underutilized within the Hollywood machine due to the color of his skin. The roles that he was offered were limited. He refused many of them because of a conscious decision not to subject his image or his people to marginalization –which contributed to his decade-long hiatus from film at the height of his marketability.
Not even the systemic racism that crippled the careers of so many – including his Carmen Jones co-star Dorothy Dandridge –could stifle Belafonte’s impact or dim his light, mainly because activism was at the core of his art and his life.
One day after being presented with the Academy Awards’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on November 8, 2014, Belafonte could be found in Ferguson.
He and fellow artist/activist Danny Glover conversed with a small group of protest and community leaders for a private, closed-door meeting. The gathering took place as demonstrations had been underway for months in response to the death of Michael Brown – who was fatally shot by a Ferguson police officer on August 9th of that year.
“I think Ferguson sits as the first real substantive display of a community that is willing to take on the necessary protest and the necessary rebellious nature that is required to make this issue [of fatal police shootings] able to be discussed by everybody,” Belafonte told Gregg Killday of Billboard. “What does civil disobedience really mean? Not in its tactical design, but its moral power. That’s being debated.”
Natural born activist
Harry Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. on March 1, 1927, in Harlem, New York to Jamaican-born parents Harold George Bellanfanti Sr. and Melvine Bellanfanti.
He considered his inclination towards activism to be an inheritance of sorts from his mother. It was cultivated as a small boy when he accompanied her to Marcus Garvey rallies in the early 1930s.
“I saw her passion for justice,” Belafonte said. “All of that rubbed off on me – and here I am.”
His family returned to Jamaica, where Belafonte spent a portion of his youth before returning to his native Harlem to attend high school.
He left school to serve his country by way of the U.S. Navy. Like so many Black men returning home from World War II, his reward for service included limited opportunities and menial labor jobs. While working as a janitor’s assistant, he was given two tickets to a performance produced by the American Negro Theater in lieu of a tip. The random gesture changed the course of his existence.
“I saw theater as a social force as a political force,” Belafonte told PBS NewsHour. “I felt that art was a powerful tool and that it was what I should be doing with my life. The arts have been the greatest liberator of Black people. The arts have captured who we are – and reflected our history in an impressive and meaningful way.”
A star is catapulted
It was through the American Negro Theater that Belafonte met lifelong friend and fellow icon Sidney Poitier. In the early days of their friendship and honing their respective crafts as actors, the pair was so strapped for cash that they would buy a single ticket for a performance. Poitier would attend one act and Belafonte another. They would fill in the blanks for each other at intermission.
By the late 1940s, Belafonte and Poitier were studying at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School alongside Bea Arthur, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis and Walter Matthau among others while performing with the American Negro Theater.
“How we presented ourselves was very important to Sidney and myself,” Belafonte said in the 2018 Simon Frederick documentary They’ve Gotta Have Us. “We decided that our task would be to not just do the best that we could with the platform that was offered us, but to make sure that we did not perpetuate the stereotypes that had been used by cinema so effectively and disastrously to the definition of who Black people were and what they were.”
By the early 1950s, Belafonte had become the first Black man to win a Tony Award for his Broadway debut performance in John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.
Soon after his musical career and film career launched in close succession.
“Fortunately for me, I was a runaway success in the world at large,” Belafonte said in Elvis Mitchell’s documentary Is That Black Enough For You. ‘I had a globe so passionately approving of my presence in their midst.”
His breakthrough album Calypso, released in 1956, became the first LP in the world to sell one million copies.
The song Banana Boat, commonly referred to as Day-O, was the album’s signature track and became an instant classic.
“Banana Boat wasn’t just a song that delighted people,” Belafonte said via video as he received the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s 33rd Annual National Equal Justice Award. “If they dug deeply enough into the lyrics of that song it is a song of power and protest from the Black voice. ‘Six hand, seven hand, eight hand bunch. Daylight come and me want to go home.’ That wraps up a whole life of who we are.”
By 1960 he had become the first Black man to receive an Emmy Award for his “Tonight with Belafonte” television special in 1960.
His film career continued through 2018, concluding with his appearance as elder statesman activist Jerome Turner in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.
He won three Grammy awards in the 1960s. He was a Kennedy Center Honors for Performing Arts recipient in 1989. In 1994, then President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts.
Last year, Belafonte became the oldest living inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when he was enshrined in the Early Influence category.
And through it all, he used the leverage that came with his celebrity to help bend the world towards equity and justice.
“I think Mr. B. has established early and often that there is a way in which to use your platform with dignity – but with a sharp edge,” Belafonte mentee, fellow actor and activist Jesse Williams said in a video honoring Belafonte with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s 33rd Annual National Equal Justice Award.
In the wake of his passing, social media tributes and personal statements poured in and reflected his broad scope of influence.
“Harry Belafonte was a standard bearer, in the tradition of [Paul] Robeson, for generational artistry and deeply informed and committed social and political engagement,” award-winning actor Jeffrey L. Wright said via Twitter. “Maybe the last of a great tribe. As smart as he was knockdown handsome, he met the moment throughout his life.”