The calypso king who fought for civil rights
Harry Belafonte 1927–2023
Harry Belafonte was an American legend. An electrifying performer, he was the first Black Emmy Award winner, the first Black man to win a Tony, and the first person of any race to have a record sell more than 1 million copies. But he also made history beyond the entertainment world. A major bankroller of his friend Martin Luther King Jr. and a key liaison between Black activists and Hollywood, he helped the civil rights movement gain wider public acceptance. The cause of justice animated nearly everything he did. Even “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” the playful calypso tune that became his calling card, had a political message. “It spoke about the struggles of the people who are underpaid, who are the victims of colonialism,” he said in 2011. “It talked about our aspirations for a better way of life.”
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in Harlem, said Time, into a childhood “rife with hardship and sorrow.” His father from Martinique and mother from Jamaica, both mixed-race, were “undocumented immigrants who constantly changed jobs, apartments, and even their names to avoid authorities,” and they parked him with relatives in Jamaica from age 9 to 13. Suffering from undiagnosed dyslexia, he dropped out of high school and joined the Navy at age 17, “hoping for adventure and glory,” but was instead relegated to grunt work loading munitions onto ships in New Jersey. After his service, he worked as a janitor in a New York City building where, in 1945, a tenant gave him tickets to a play at the American Negro Theater. “That experience proved life-changing.” He joined the troupe—which included Sidney Poitier, who would become a lifelong friend—and enrolled in drama classes.
Belafonte first made his mark as a nightclub singer, said Variety. With traditional tunes such as “Day-O” and “Matilda,” he single-handedly “spawned a calypso craze,” and his third album, 1956’s Calypso, spent “a staggering 31 weeks” atop the charts. “Handsome and charismatic, he left audiences spellbound,” said The New York Times, and Hollywood took notice. He became a near-instant matinee idol, appearing alongside Dorothy Dandridge in 1954’s Carmen Jones—an all-Black update of the opera Carmen. Yet with success came a racist backlash. His status as Joan Fontaine’s love interest in 1957’s Island in the Sun “generated outrage” in the segregated South, and he quit his Emmy-winning 1959 variety show, Tonight With Belafonte, after CBS tried to modify the show following Southern complaints about the integrated cast.
Frustrated, Belafonte “used his celebrity to turn a spotlight on injustice,” said The Washington Post. He co-organized the 1963 March on Washington, where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and invited Hollywood luminaries such as Marlon Brando, Rita Moreno, and Paul Newman to come, giving them a prominent place “directly in the path of TV cameras.” That same year, he raised $50,000 to bail King and other activists out of jail in Birmingham, Ala.; the next year he joined Poitier to personally deliver $70,000 to protesters in Mississippi, where the pair narrowly escaped a Ku Klux Klan ambush. His visibility “made him a target for surveillance”—he later found out that his manager and therapist were both FBI informants. After King’s 1968 assassination, Belafonte became “a roving humanitarian without portfolio.” He was “a driving force” behind the star-studded 1985 single “We Are the World,” and after a long campaign against apartheid in South Africa, he helped organize Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the U.S. in 1990.
Belafonte was forever uncompromising in his desire to “change America and the world,” said USA Today. In a 2006 meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, he called George W. Bush
“the greatest terrorist in the world.” He said Barack Obama didn’t care enough about poor people, and he compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. The resulting controversies didn’t faze him. “I’ve always looked at the world and thought, what can I do next? How can we fix it?” he said in a 2011 documentary. “And that’s still how I look at the world, because there is so much to be done.”