Harry Belafonte keeps up the fight
For many years, Harry Belafonte’s feeling about Houston was scarred by his 1967 visit in which he joined Aretha Franklin and Martin Luther King Jr. onstage at the old Sam Houston Colisueum.
The concert and rally to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was disrupted repeatedly by smoke bombs that left audience members gasping for air.
“I was told that if I came to Houston, I would fare no better than John F. Kennedy did in Dallas,” Belafonte said then.
The multitalented artist, entertainer and activist turns 90 on March 1, and his impression about the nation’s fourth-largest city has softened.
“I must say Houston has since redeemed itself,” he said by phone.
On Thursday, Brilliant Lecture Series and H-E-B present “An Evening With Harry Belafonte,” 7 p.m. at the Cullen Theater at Wortham Center. The interview will be conducted by Houston physician and philanthropist Yvonne Cormier.
Belafonte is using the milestone birthday to release a new album, “When Colors Come Together: The Legacy of Harry Belafonte,” to celebrate his life’s work of nurturing racial harmony and fighting injustice through art. A multiethnic children’s choir performs a new version of his classic “Island in the Sun” on the album.
“Everybody is excited that I’m turning 90 years old because it gives them a chance to exploit something that they think is milestone but I find to be absolutely terrifying,” Belafonte said in his signature deep, raspy voice. (He stopped singing in 2004 because of issues with his vocal cords.)
“When I think about the age of 90, all I can remember was when I was 10 years old and I thought anything 90 was a mummy.”
Belafonte seems far from slowing down as he heads into the next decade of his life.
Last month, he was the co-chairman of the Women’s March on Washington but didn’t attend because of poor health. But in October, he led the inaugural “Many Rivers to Cross” festival, a music and social justice event that included Carlos Santana, John Legend, Macklemore, Robert Glasper and Common in Fairburn, Ga.
The festival was presented by his social justice organization Sankofa.org, which he founded in 2013 and is co-directed by his daughter, Gina Belafonte. The organization’s mission is to help artists become activists.
Belafonte says his next social statement will be A Day Without Women on March 8. The organizers behind the Women’s March on Washington are calling for a women’s strike to show the nation what a day without them would look and feel like.
“If you think you know about how important women are to your life, you’ll truly understand it then. A Day Without Women will leave a troubling canvas for the nation to deal with.”
Belafonte has never backed down from a good fight. He doesn’t mince his words either, speaking like a poet about the pains of discrimination, racism and poverty.
“I didn’t like racial oppression. I didn’t like economic oppression. I rebelled against it. In that spirit, that rebellion carried over into all the choices I’ve made in my life. … It was my rebellion against the social state that shaped what I did,” he said.
He was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in Harlem to immigrant parents — a Jamaican mother and a Martinique father — who fueled his love for Caribbean music and culture. His parents changed the spelling of their family name to avoid immigration officials.
Growing up poor, more than anything, shaped his life, which inextricably linked art and activism.
“I found it so cruel and so unacceptable that in my earliest years I rebelled against the social image and the social condition. I saw what poverty did to the human spirit and did to the human condition,” he said.
One of his most telling childhood memories was seeing his mother rejected after she waited in a long employment line for a housekeeping job. She sat on the bed in their one-room apart- ment, staring at the walls before she spoke.
“I asked her what troubled her. She said to me, ‘Harry, I want you to promise me something. That you will never let a day go by where you see an injustice and didn’t participate in trying to oppose it.’ ”
Belafonte, who served in the U.S. Navy for nearly two years, was working as a janitor’s assistant when a customer handed him tickets to a play at The American Negro Theater in Harlem. Afterward, he became immersed in theater and singing, taking up friendships with jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. His Caribbean music, particularly on his million-selling “Calypso” album, put him on an international stage and started him on the activism path.
He became comrades with King and used earnings from his music to help fund the civil rights movement. One of his most famous accounts was when he enlisted his actor friend Sydney Poitier to help him deliver $70,000 to Mississippi for the movement.
Even though Poitier joked that he never wanted to talk with Belafonte upon their return, the two still talk regularly by phone today. Belafonte would go on to enlist friends and fellow artists in many of his activist pursuits.
In 1985, Belafonte helped organize the Grammy-winning song “We Are the World,” a multiartist effort to raise funds to fight famine in Africa. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. He also engaged in efforts to end apartheid in South Africa and to release Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990.
Belafonte has won three Grammys, a Tony and was the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor. He was the first African-American TV producer and the first to win an Emmy for his CBS show, “Tonight With Belafonte,” in 1960.
He hopes his new album will spark a younger generation of artists and activists, particularly in the Trump era.
“I welcome the fact that Donald Trump is president of the United States of America because what he did with his rather negative social position on so many issues is that he illuminated the ambivalence of the American people,” he said.
Belafonte knows there’s more work to be done yet is reflective about his life. Last week, a Harlem library was named in his honor.
“A lot of the positions I took socially and politically I was crucified for, but I’ve been redeemed by being a part of movements that have changed American conduct in so many instances. I’m rewarded by what the world has turned out to be.”