Harry Belafonte, groundbreaking entertainer and activist, dies at age 96 (2023)

The cause was congestive heart failure, his spokesman Ken Sunshine said.

Born to immigrant parents from Jamaica, Mr. Belafonte grew up in poverty in Depression-era Harlem and achieved great success in black popular music. In five decades as a film, television and theater star, he has broken through a number of barriers. His artistic and humanitarian work often overlapped, reflecting his belief that "the role of art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be."

A confidant of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Belafonte was for many years a liaison between the civil rights movement and the entertainment capitals of Hollywood and New York. He also used his influence to promote the fight against apartheid in South Africa and fight famine through, among other things"We Are the World"recordings and concerts in 1985.

Mr Belafonte once said he spent his life "in a constant state of rebellion". He strongly rebuked US presidents – Democrats and Republicans – for not doing enough to end poverty in the United States or conflict abroad. He criticized George W. Bush's White House for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and caused a stir when he compared Colin Powell, also of Jamaican descent and then Secretary of State, to a "house slave."

He was also critical of the country's first African-American president, saying that "for all his slickness and intellect, Barack Obama seems to have no basic empathy for the dispossessed, whether white or black." To fuel his opponents, Mr. Belafonte has allied himself with oppressive leaders of the left such asFidel CastroCuba inHugo ChavezVenezuela.

"I wasn't an artist turned activist," Mr. Belafonte liked to say. "I was an activist turned artist."

Masculine and muscular, with a jaunty smile and hoarse voice, Mr. Belafonte rose to fame in the 1950s for his bold sensuality that defied sexual taboos in an era of racial segregation. At concerts and on television, he was portrayed to the public as a snake hip charmer, dressed in unbuttoned shirts that clung to the contours of his body.

A year after the film industry's production code lifted the ban on showing interracial sexual relations in films, Mr. Belafonte played a beloved white actressJohanna Fontainein "Island in the Sun" (1957). In This Cauldron, a film later disavowed as too tame, he was touted as the first Black Mornings idol for mainstream audiences.

He was the first black person to win a Tony Award on Broadway for his interpretation of American and Caribbean folk music in John Murray Anderson's Almanac in 1953. Six years later, he was the first African-American producer to receive an Emmy Award for Tonight With Belafonte, a CBS special that depicted the life story of African Americans through music.

First and foremost, he was a recording star. His 1956 album"Calypso"it has sold over 1 million copies, making it a brief rival to Elvis Presley on the pop chart and sparking worldwide interest in music with a Caribbean twist.

"Never before was there a singer as popular with middle-class white audiences as he was with black audiences," said cultural critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in an interview. "In that sense, he was an agent of change, the musical voice of civil rights."

Using music to advocate universal brotherhood, Belafonte encouraged audiences to collectively sing calypso songs, protest and chain gang songs, ballads"Danny Boy"and a Hebrew folk song"I don't have Nagili.”

His voice, though classically untrained, was deeply moving and had a wide range. A critic for Time magazine commented that "it can go brazen as a trumpet, musky with melancholy, or high and quivering as a flute. It can handle the high, oppressive tension of the West Indies, the open throat of the bayou- land, the soft round buzz of the Scottish Borderlands.

As a testament to his appeal, Belafonte was selected in 1968 as the first black replacement for Johnny Carson on NBC's "The Tonight Show," the top-rated late-night talk show in the country. Mr. Belafonte used the platform not only for entertainment, but also to discuss civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the Appalachian famine with guests like King and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

In the same year, Mr. Belafonte and British singer White Petula Clark performed an anti-war duet"On the Road to Glory"on an NBC special. The publicity manager for automaker Chrysler-Plymouth, which sponsored the show, objected when Clark spontaneously touched Mr. Belafonte's shoulder.

The manager who interrupted the song and called for it to be repeated was later reprimanded by Chrysler and called Mr. Belafonte to apologize. "Your apology came 100 years too late," the singer replied. NBC kept the scene when the show was televised. Mr. Belafonte later said in an interview, "It's important for TV and the industry to know that people like this exist. I'm tired and frustrated with what I've had to endure in this medium."

Mr. Belafonte met King in 1956, when a then little-known minister called and invited King to speak at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Mr Belafonte, who was two years older than King, said the sermon "shocked him" and went on to speak of King as a life-changing figure.

"I wasn't peaceful by nature — or if I was, growing up on the streets of Harlem unnerved me — so for a while I saw nonviolence more as a clever organizational tactic than anything else," he wrote in his letter. 2011 memoir "My Song" written with Michael Shnayerson.

"As I got to know Martin better and saw how nonviolence was put to the test, I came to appreciate his spiritual and emotional value," he added. "I found myself wanting to live these values, both to help the movement and to wash away my personal anger."

As one of King's major benefactors, Mr. Belafonte ends his friendships with Frank SinatraMarlon brando,Lena Hoornand Henry Fonda to raise more than $100,000 to fund the 1964 Freedom Rides, which challenged racial segregation in interstate transportation.

He also brought Brando,Charltona Hestona,Paul Newmanand Tony Bennett at the 1963 march on Washington where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech—a critical display of white support that made King's speech even more universal in its appeal.

As one of the highest paid entertainers in show business, Belafonte quickly raised large sums of money to free civil rights leaders and ordinary protesters from Southern prisons. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, his 23-room mansion on West End Avenue in Manhattan was used by movement leaders and Justice Department officials as a private place for mutual complaints. It was also where the older and younger members of the movement, as well as its peacekeeping and militant wings, brokered truces.

“At key moments, he was one of the most critical supporters of the civil rights movement,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch. "Harry was a powerful force in keeping people on an equal footing."

After King's assassination in 1968, Belafonte became an itinerant humanitarian with no portfolio. He helped found TransAfrica, a lobby group pushing for economic sanctions against South Africa's apartheid regime. He lobbied for the release of FrNelson Mandelaand then helped coordinate the future South African president's first post-liberation visit to the United States in 1990.

As the driving force behind "We Are the World", Mr. Belafonte put the musical spotlight on artists likeMichael Jacksonand Lionel Richie and fell into the chorus of stars. The project raised tens of millions of dollars for medical supplies and food, and Mr. Belafonte took part in the arduous mission to deliver these supplies to aid workers in Sudan and Ethiopia.

After the death of artist Danny Kaye in 1987, Belafonte became the second American to be named a "goodwill ambassador" for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund. He used this position to unite artists and intellectuals in Africa to focus on issues such as famine, polio and malaria.

Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born in Manhattan on March 1, 1927. His father, whom Harry later recalled was a drunkard, bully, and womanizer, was often away from home, working as a cook on "bananas" between the ports of New York and the Caribbean. phone call.

His mother, the former Melvine Love, had to look after Harry and youngest son Dennis. She overstayed her visa and changed her name, eventually to Belafonte, to evade immigration authorities. She also tried to pass herself and her children off as Spanish or French as they moved from neighborhood to neighborhood living what Mr. Belafonte would call an "underground life."

His mother, who occasionally found work as a cook, tried to take her son to classes to eat leftovers. He was "defined" by poverty, he wrote in his diary.

Self-described as an "angry misfit", he said he probably had undiagnosed dyslexia. He dropped out of formal education in ninth grade and spent his days running around with the gangs. He also went to the cinema.

Belafonte watched the World War II propaganda film Sahara (1943) and was impressed by the scene in which Rex Ingram, a black actor playing a Sudanese soldier, strangles a Nazi officer by pushing his face into the North African sand . "The revenge scene was thrilling," he wrote. "I've never seen a movie where a black hero is so heroic."

The day after his 17th birthday, he enlisted in the Navy and soon broke out of romantic views of the military community. On minor offenses, he spent two weeks in a naval prison where he saw German prisoners of war treated better. "The injustice of it sickened me," he wrote, adding that the experience "radicalized" him politically.

After 18 months in the Navy, he found a job as a janitor in a Harlem apartment building, where a grateful tenant gave him tickets to the American Negro Theater. He had never seen art. The actors, he wrote, were "so composed and self-assured that they exuded a power that seemed to me spiritual."

He began volunteering in the theater, slowly earning small roles, and befriended another aspiring actor, Sidney Poitier, who, like Belafonte, was from the poor West Indies. With few theatrical prospects as a black actor, Mr. Belafonte spent most of his time staging propaganda plays in union halls.

He had an unforgettable but lucrative career aspop singerin 1949 and 1950, earning the money he desperately needed to support his growing family. He resigned after getting engaged in Miami, where, he wrote, white women winked at him from the front row. "As long as I was humming love songs on stage, I had a certain power over them," he wrote. "But when the lights came on, I was just another man of color going back to Color City — or else."

Meanwhile, he found a mentor in African-American artist Paul Robeson, a prominent civil and labor rights activist who was persecuted by federal authorities for his openly pro-Soviet views. At Robeson's urging, Belafonte began using folk songs to denounce racism, poverty, and other social ills.

Mr. Belafonte rose to fame with the song "Calypso," which transformed melodies from the Caribbean islands for American listeners. The album contained many songs that he will forever identify with: "The Banana Boat Song", the ballad "Jamaica Farewell","Come Back Lisa"I"A wise man (a smarter woman)."

His live recording“Belafonte met Carnegie Hall”(1959), which centered on folk music from around the world, was a commercial and artistic triumph that remained in the Billboard Top 10 for over three years.

Mr. Belafonte has won Grammy Awards for his folk recordings"Swing die hamer"(1960), Home and Abroad (1961) and An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965), the latter with his protege, South African singer Miriam Makeba. His 1962 album"Midnight Special"boosted the career of young harmonica player Bob Dylan, who then made one of his first recordings.

“He could play to a packed house at Carnegie Hall one night, and show up at a clothing center union meeting the next,” Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One. "Harry didn't care. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel part of the human race. There has never been an artist who has crossed so many boundaries as Harry."

"You know," added Dylan, "he never took the easy way out, though he could have."

For much of Hollywood's history, black people have been depicted on screen, if at all, in demeaning, stereotyped roles or in isolated song and dance segments that theater owners in the South could cut.

When Poitier began his Hollywood career in the 1950s playing people of sophistication and professional aspirations, Belafonte launched a cinematic legacy that was very different.

He made his film debut in"Bright Road"(1953), starring a headmaster opposite a teacher played by Dorothy Dandridge. They united"Carmen Jones"(1954), starring Mr. Belafonte as an army soldier who falls in love with a temptress. In the studio, opera singers - LeVern Hutcherson and Marilyn Horne, respectively - dubbed their voices.

There was a stiffness to Mr. Belafonte's early, untrained screen appearances, and he admitted he was unaware of morning idol roles.

Mr. Belafonte, whose second and third marriages were to white women, was also dissatisfied with filmmaking, feeling that the film studios had not gone far enough to realistically depict interracial love.

He noted that while the heat may have been felt on screen with Fontaine - and Inger Stevens in the doomsday "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" (1959) - viewers didn't see the kisses. This decision by the studio bosses enraged Mr. Belafonte.

After a commercial failure"Opportunities for Tomorrow"(1959), a suspenseful drama about bank robberies and race relations in which he starred and co-produced, exiled himself from films for over a decade.

In his memoirs, Belafonte said he regularly turned down roles that seemed "castrated" in terms of sex and anger — traits that marked his inner life. The roles he turned down included Poitier's Oscar-winning performance as a Southwest drifter who helps a group of German nuns in "Lilies in the Field" (1963), and Poitier's role as a teacher who comes to the aid of unruly students in "Lilies in the Field" (1963). For the love of the Lord." (1967).

"Before Hollywood, Sidney was the only black actor with whom white America felt comfortable because of the dignity he exuded, this sexless prowess," Belafonte wrote in his autobiography. "It really bothered me that in the midst of the civil rights movement, when the Jim Crow laws came down, the only black people selling movie tickets was someone who wasn't a threat to the masculinity of white moviegoers."

In an occasional film career, Mr. Belafonte's best role was widely regarded as the ruthless gang leader in Robert Altman's drama."Miasto Kansas"(1996). The play, which he said was based on the rougher edges of his upbringing, won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor.

The scope of Mr. Belafonte's work has earned him the National Medal of Arts in 1994, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1989, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the NAACP and Grammys. In 2014, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Prize Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Gates, the scholar, called him "a hub and remnant of the fervent devotion of the old radical left", adding that Mr Belafonte "sees himself as the single voice" of defending the causes left behind by blacks who have left the establishment advance.

His uncompromising behavior strained or ended the once close friendships with Poitier and Bill Cosby. He also distanced himself from King's relatives, criticizing them for being more interested in capitalizing on the civil rights leader's legacy than using his position to support issues such as poverty alleviation and labor rights.

His first marriage, to Marguerite Byrd, ended in divorce in 1957. That same year, he married Julie Robinson, who was of Russian Jewish descent and was a dancer with the otherwise all-black Katherine Dunham Dance Co. In 2004, Belafonte married Pamela Frank, a photographer involved in his activist projects, four years later.

In addition to his wife, he was survived by two daughters from his first marriage, actress and model Shari Belafonte and Adrienne Biesemeyer; two children from his second marriage, actresses Gina Belafonte and David Belafonte; two stepchildren, Sarah Frank and Lindsey Frank; and eight grandchildren.

After lifting himself out of poverty, Mr. Belafonte was determined to make his mark - his voice - sometimes at a personal and professional cost. "I am a determined man," he once told the London Guardian. "Ego driven, conscience driven, always looking for another song."