Harry Belafonte, US actor and civil rights activist, dies at 96

Harry Belafonte, a singer, songwriter and groundbreaking actor who began his leisure profession belting, Day O, in his Nineteen Fifties hit track “Banana Boat” earlier than turning to political activism, has died on the age of 96, the New York Occasions reported.

The reason for Belafonte’s demise was congestive coronary heart failure, his longtime spokesperson Ken Sunshine instructed the Occasions on Tuesday.

As a Black main man who explored racial themes in Nineteen Fifties films, Belafonte would later transfer on to working along with his pal Martin Luther King Jr throughout the US civil rights motion within the early Nineteen Sixties.

He turned the driving power behind the celebrity-studded, famine-fighting hit track, We Are the World, within the Nineteen Eighties.

Belafonte as soon as stated he was in a continuing state of revolt that was pushed by anger.

“I’ve bought to be part of regardless of the revolt is that tries to alter all this,” he instructed the New York Occasions in 2001. “The anger is a vital gasoline. Rise up is wholesome.”

Belafonte was born in New York Metropolis’s borough of Manhattan however spent his early childhood in his household’s native Jamaica. Good-looking and suave, he got here to be generally known as the “King of Calypso” early in his profession.

He was the primary Black particular person allowed to carry out in lots of plush nightspots and likewise had racial breakthroughs in films at a time when segregation prevailed in a lot of the US.

In, Island within the Solar, in 1954, his character entertained notions of a relationship with a white girl performed by Joan Fontaine, which reportedly triggered threats to burn down theatres within the US South. In 1959’s, Odds Towards Tomorrow, Belafonte performed a financial institution robber with a racist accomplice.

Within the Nineteen Sixties, he campaigned with King, and within the Nineteen Eighties, he labored to finish apartheid in South Africa and coordinated Nelson Mandela‘s first go to to the US.

‘We’re the world’

Belafonte travelled the world as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Youngsters’s Fund, in 1987 and later began an AIDS basis. In 2014, he obtained an Academy Award for his humanitarian work.

Belafonte supplied the impetus for We Are the World, the 1985 all-star musical collaboration that raised cash for famine aid in Ethiopia. After seeing a grim information report on the famine, he wished to do one thing much like the fund-raising track, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, by the British supergroup Band Assist a 12 months earlier.

We Are the World featured superstars equivalent to Michael Jackson, Stevie Marvel, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Diana Ross and raised tens of millions of {dollars}.

“Lots of people say to me, ‘When as an artist did you resolve to develop into an activist?’” Belafonte stated in a Nationwide Public Radio interview in 2011. “I say to them, ‘I used to be lengthy an activist earlier than I turned an artist.’”

Even in his late 80s, Belafonte was nonetheless talking out on race and earnings equality and urging President Barack Obama to do extra to assist the poor. He was a co-chair of the Ladies’s March on Washington held the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president in January 2017.

Belafonte’s politics made headlines in January 2006 throughout a visit to Venezuela when he known as President George W Bush “the best terrorist on the planet”. That very same month, he in contrast the US Homeland Safety Division with the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.

An anthology of his music was launched to mark Belafonte’s ninetieth birthday on March 1, 2017. Just a few weeks earlier than the launch, Belafonte instructed Rolling Stone journal that singing was a approach for him to specific injustices on the planet.

“It gave me an opportunity to make political commentary, to make social statements, to speak about issues that I discovered that had been disagreeable – and issues that I discovered that had been inspiring,” he stated.

Early years

Born Harold George Bellanfanti in New York’s Harlem neighbourhood, he moved to Jamaica earlier than returning to New York to attend highschool.

He had described his father as an abusive drunk who deserted him and his mom, leaving Belafonte with a eager for a secure household. He drew energy from his mom, an uneducated home employee, who instilled an activist spirit in him.

“We had been instructed to by no means capitulate, to by no means yield, to all the time resist oppression,” Belafonte instructed Sure! journal.

Throughout World Struggle II, these ideas led him to hitch the US Navy, which additionally supplied stability after he dropped out of highschool.

“The Navy got here as a spot of aid for me,” Belafonte instructed Sure! “However I used to be additionally pushed by the assumption that Hitler needed to be defeated.

“My dedication sustained itself after the battle. Wherever I discovered resistance to oppression, whether or not in Africa, in Latin America, actually right here in America within the South, I joined that resistance.”

After the Navy, Belafonte labored as a janitor in an residence constructing and as a stagehand on the American Negro Theater earlier than getting roles and finding out with Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier, one other pioneering Black actor who would develop into an in depth pal.

He additionally appeared on Broadway in, Almanac, successful a Tony Award, and within the film, Carmen Jones, in 1954.

Belafonte’s third album, Calypso, turned the primary by a single performer to promote a couple of million copies. Banana Boat, a track about Caribbean dock employees with its resounding name of “Day O”, made him a star. Surgical procedure to take away a node on his vocal cords within the Nineteen Sixties, nonetheless, diminished his voice to a raspy whisper.

In 1959, he started producing movies and teamed with Poitier to supply, Buck and the Preacher, and, Uptown Saturday Night time. In 1984, he produced, Beat Road, one of many first films about break-dancing and hip-hop tradition.

Belafonte was the primary Black performer to win a significant Emmy in 1960 along with his look on a tv selection particular. He additionally received Grammy Awards in 1960 and 1965 and obtained a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2000 however voiced frustration on the limits on Black artists in present enterprise. In 1994, Belafonte was awarded the Nationwide Medal of Arts.

Belafonte was married 3 times. He and his first spouse Marguerite Byrd had two kids, together with actress-model Shari Belafonte. He additionally had two kids with second spouse Julia Robinson, a former dancer.