Harry Belafonte, Legendary Singer, Actor and Political Activist, Dies at 96

Belafonte’s cause of death appears to have been congestive heart failure, his spokesman, Ken Sunshine, told The New York Times. Sunshine has only provided statements to this American media outlet.

As an African-American leading man exploring racial themes in 1950s films, Belafonte would later go on to work with his friend Martin Luther King Jr. during the American civil rights movement in the early 1960s. In the 1980s, he became the driving force behind the song “We Are the World,” a celebrity-studded famine-fighting hit.

Belafonte once claimed that he was in a constant state of rebellion fueled by anger.

United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and promoter of ‘We are the World’

Belafonte traveled the world as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, in 1987 and later created an AIDS foundation. In 2014 he received an Oscar for his humanitarian work.

Belafonte spearheaded ‘We Are the World,’ the 1985 all-star musical collaboration that raised famine funds in Ethiopia. After seeing a grim report on the famine, he wanted to do something along the lines of the song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ from British supergroup Band Aid, who had raised funds a year earlier.

‘We Are the World’ featured superstars including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Diana Ross, and raised millions of dollars.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘When did you decide, as an artist, to become an activist?'” Belafonte said in an interview on National Public Radio in 2011. “I tell them, ‘I was an activist for a long time before I became an artist. ‘”, he sentenced in that same space.

Even after turning 80, Belafonte was still speaking out on income and racial equality and urging President Barack Obama to do more to help the poor. She co-chaired the Women’s March on Washington held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in January 2017.

Belafonte’s politics made headlines in January 2006 during a trip to Venezuela when he called President George W. Bush “the world’s greatest terrorist.” That same month he compared the US Department of Homeland Security to the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.

On the occasion of Belafonte’s 90th birthday, on March 1, 2017, an anthology of his music was published. A few weeks before the release, Belafonte told Rolling Stone magazine that singing was a way for him to express the injustices in the world.

“It gave me the opportunity to make political comments, to make social statements, to talk about things that I found disgusting… and things that I found inspiring,” he said.

Born Harold George Bellanfanti in the New York borough of Harlem, he moved to Jamaica before returning to New York for high school.

He described his father as an abusive drunk who abandoned him and his mother, leaving Belafonte yearning for a stable family. He drew strength from his mother, an uneducated domestic worker, who instilled in him the activist spirit.

“They taught us never to capitulate, never to give in, to always resist oppression,” Belafonte told ‘Yes!’ magazine. long ago.

a life of struggles

During World War II, those principles led him to enlist in the Navy, which also provided him with stability after dropping out of high school.

“The Navy was a place of relief for me,” Belafonte told ‘Yes!’. “But I was also driven by the belief that Hitler had to be defeated… My commitment remained after the war. Wherever I encountered resistance to oppression, whether it was in Africa, in Latin America, certainly here in the United States, in the South, I joined that resistance”.

After the Navy, Belafonte worked as an apartment building janitor and as a stagehand at the American Negro Theater before landing roles and studying with Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier, another pioneering African-American actor who would become a close friend.

He also appeared on Broadway in “Almanac,” for which he won a Tony Award, and in the film “Carmen Jones” in 1954.

Belafonte’s third album, “Calypso,” became the first by a single performer to sell more than a million copies. “Banana Boat,” a song about Caribbean longshoremen with its ringing “Day O,” made him a star. However, in the 1960s, surgery to remove a nodule on his vocal cords reduced his voice to a raspy whisper.

In 1959 he began producing movies and partnered with Poitier to produce “Buck and the Preacher” and “Uptown Saturday Night.” In 1984, he produced “Beat Street,” one of the first films about break-dancing and hip-hop culture.

Belafonte was the first black performer to win an Emmy in 1960 with his appearance on a television variety special. He, too, won Grammy Awards in 1960 and 1965 and received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2000, but expressed frustration with the limits placed on black artists in show business. In 1994, Belafonte received the National Medal of Arts.

Belafonte was married three times. With his first wife, Marguerite Byrd, he had two children, including actress and model Shari Belafonte. He also had two children with his second wife, Julia Robinson, a former dancer.

with Reuters