Harry Belafonte

Singer, actor, and activist

• Born: March 1, 1927
• Birthplace: Harlem, New York
• Died: April 24, 2023
• Place of death: New York City, New York

In an entertainment career spanning more than six decades, Belafonte charmed global audiences singing pop, jazz, and calypso music; entertained moviegoers in dozens of roles; and inspired and supported generations of activists devoted to civil rights and social justice worldwide.

Areas of achievement: Film: acting; Film: production; Music: folk and country; Music: Latin, Caribbean, and reggae; Music: pop; Social issues

Early Life

Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born in Harlem, New York, to Melvine Love Belafonte, a housekeeper, and Harold George Belafonte, Sr., a chef in the British Royal Navy. Belafonte spent part of his childhood living with his paternal grandmother in Jamaica. When he returned to New York as a teenager, World War II had begun. He attended George Washington High School for a single year, then joined the war effort by enlisting in the navy. After the war, Belafonte enrolled in acting classes with the renowned German director Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School in New York City. Among Belafonte’s classmates was another talented young Black man with whom he would be compared for a lifetime: Sidney Poitier.

Life’s Work

In order to pay for his uptown acting classes, Belafonte began singing—first pop and later jazz—in downtown clubs. He started a recording career in 1949 as a pop singer with the Roost label. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the New York jazz scene included such luminaries as Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Miles Davis. Belafonte appeared with these jazz greats in various clubs and received a contract with RCA Victor in 1952. His debut solo television special, Tonight with Harry Belafonte (1959), was honored with an Emmy, the first time the award had been given to an African American man.

Although Belafonte would record for RCA in many musical genres from the 1950s to the 1970s, he was most associated in the public mind with calypso music from the West Indies. His breakthrough album, Calypso (1956), and his second calypso album, Jump Up Calypso (1961), were both million sellers. In the 1960s and 1970s, Belafonte focused much of his musical attention on folk music from many parts of the world. He introduced South African singer Miriam Makeba and Greek singer Nana Mouskouri to American audiences, appearing live and recording with both women. Although he recorded only sporadically after the 1970’s, Belafonte continued to perform worldwide, frequently in benefit concerts for social causes. He gave a particularly notable performance on the children’s program The Muppet Show (1978), singing the spiritual “Turn the World Around.” Muppet creator Jim Henson so loved that episode that Belafonte was asked to reprise the song at Henson’s 1990 memorial. Belafonte was executive producer of his last major television appearance as a singer: An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Friends (1997). Failing health caused Belafonte to cancel a reunion tour with Mouskouri planned for 2003. That year, the seventy-six-year-old singer gave what he called his final concert, a benefit for the Atlanta Opera.

Belafonte was never a major motion-picture star, but he played leading roles in a number of films over a span of five decades. In the 1950s, Belafonte was a strikingly handsome and intense presence in five feature films. In Carmen Jones (1954), an update of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen with an all-Black cast, Belafonte played a lovesick American G.I. who goes away without leave (AWOL) in pursuit of the fiery Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge). In the melodrama Island in the Sun (1957), he portrayed a dedicated labor leader in Barbados who resists his attraction to a White woman (Joan Fontaine). Belafonte formed his own film production company in the late 1950s and produced the crime drama Odds against Tomorrow (1959), in which Belafonte’s character teams up with a racist (played by Robert Ryan) to rob a bank.

In the 1970s Belafonte appeared in two films directed by his longtime friend Poitier: Buck and the Preacher (1972) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). These films, one a western buddy film and the other a contemporary urban comedy, both with Black casts and crews, played an important part in the Black cinema movement of the 1970’s. In Uptown, Belafonte displayed his talent for comedy, playing the top gangster in a deft, full-mouthed imitation of Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972). A mature Belafonte delivered two especially strong performances in the 1990s as well: as a wealthy CEO locked in a struggle with a factory worker (John Travolta) in a film set in an alternative America where racial power has been reversed in White Man’s Burden (1995), and as a Prohibition-era mob boss called Seldom Seen in Robert Altman’s Kansas City (1996). Belafonte’s witty portrayal of Seldom Seen extended the life of Geechie Dan Beauford, the delightful underworld character the actor had created more than twenty years before in Uptown Saturday Night. The performance won Belafonte the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1996.

Belafonte appeared in a handful of Broadway productions in the late 1950s. He returned to the Broadway stage in 1987 with a part in Mbongeni Ngema's antiapartheid play Asinamali!, which Belafonte also helped produce.

Belafonte connected his skills as an actor with his passion for social justice by appearing in about a dozen documentary films with progressive agendas. He was an early and consistent supporter of the American civil rights movement, a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. (and a financial provider for King’s family), and an organizer of the March on Washington in 1963. He offered financial support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Decades later he would turn his attention, energy, and financial resources to raising money for children and health care in South Africa, Rwanda, and Kenya, among other causes.

In later years, Belafonte turned to writing to illuminate his activist legacy. My Song (2012), a memoir cowritten with Michael Shnayerson, illustrates how career and advocacy entwined throughout the entertainer's life. In Gambling (2015), Belafonte recaps his involvement in the civil rights movement of 1960s and provides a brief insider's view of King.

A greatest-hits collection of Belafonte's work, titled The Very Best of Harry Belafonte, was released in 2012, and at ninety, he produced a retrospective anthology, When Colors Come Together: The Legacy of Harry Belafonte (2017), to introduce his musical work and social-justice causes to younger audiences. His archive, including music, film, and art, as well as materials related to his activism, was acquired by the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2020.

Significance

Belafonte became famous in the 1950s and 1960s as a dynamic singer and elegant, intense actor in films and on television. He appeared on stage and screen for more than fifty years and found success as a recording artist in many musical genres. Belafonte used his fame as a platform from which to campaign for civil rights, sometimes at the expense of his professional career. He was deeply involved in many struggles for social justice, not only as a financial supporter but also as a spokesman and organizer. In recognition of Belafonte’s dedication to human rights work, President John F. Kennedy appointed the actor cultural adviser to the newly formed Peace Corps in 1960.

Belafonte focused much of his international activism on health issues in African nations in the 1980’s and 1990’s. In recognition of his ongoing work, the activist was appointed goodwill ambassador by UNICEF in 1987. Belafonte has received many awards honoring his entertainment career and work in human rights, including a Kennedy Center Honor (1989), the National Medal of Arts (1994), a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (2000), the BET (Black Entertainment Television) Humanitarian Award (2006), and the Chief Justice Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award (2007), the Governors Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (2014), and the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Lifetime Achievement (2015). He has been the recipient of several honorary degrees as well and the subject of a 2014 biography, Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical .

Bibliography

Belafonte, Harry. "Harry Belafonte on Activism, Unrest and the Importance of Making People Squirm." Interview by Cambria Roth. Crosscut. Crosscut, 6 Oct. 2015. Accessed 16 Mar. 2016.

Belafonte, Harry. "Sing Your Song." Interview. HBO, 2011. Accessed 16 Mar. 2016.

Gabbard, Krin. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. Rutgers UP, 2004.

Gorier, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Temple UP, 1993.

Guilbault, Jocelyne. Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics. U of Chicago P, 2007.

Rhines, Jesse Algeron. Black Film/White Money. Rutgers UP, 1996.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “Six Decades after the Banana Boat, Harry Belafonte’s Archive Sails Home.” The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/arts/harry-belafonte-archives-schomburg.html. Accessed 20 July 2021. ‌