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Many people are familiar with the calypso and folk music gifted to us from the late Jamaican American icon Harry Belafonte, whose 98th birthday is Saturday. In 2021, Black Music Sunday profiled Belafonte.
“Born in Harlem to West Indian parents on March 1, 1927, Harold George Belafonte, Jr. would spend some of his early years in his mother’s native Jamaica,” I wrote at the time, before turning to Isaac Rosen’s Musicians Guide biography for details of his early life, and his transition into the world of entertainment.
In the five years he spent on the island he not only absorbed the music that was such a vital part of the culture but also observed the effects of colonialism, the political oppression that native Jamaicans had to endure under British rule. "That environment gave me much of my sense of the world at large and what I wanted to do with it," Belafonte was quoted as saying in the Paul Masson Summer Series. "It helped me carve out a tremendous link to other nations that reflect a similar temperament or character."
Once back in Harlem, another culturally and artistically rich environment, Belafonte became street smart, learning the hard lessons of survival in the big city. When the United States entered World War II, he ended his high school education and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After an honorable discharge he returned to New York City, where he bounced between odd jobs. His first foray into the world of entertainment came in the late 1940s when he was given two tickets to a production of the American Negro Theater. He was hooked after one performance. "I was absolutely mesmerized by that experience," he told the Ottawa Citizen in 1990. "It was really a spiritual, mystical feeling I had that night. I went backstage to see if there was anything I could do." His first leading role with the company was in Irish playwright Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Impressed by the power and message of O'Casey's words, and by the promise of theater in general, Belafonte enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, studying under famous German director Erwin Piscator, whose other students included Rod Steiger and Bea Arthur.
While Belafonte lived most of his life in the United States, both those early years spent in the Caribbean and his Caribbean-born mother shaped his future as an activist.
Geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro explored Belafonte’s Caribbean heritage for NPR in 2023.
Island Man: How Harry Belafonte's Caribbean roots helped him change America
Since Belafonte's death earlier this year at 96, tributes to his monumental life have been dominated by his legacies in the United States. This is the country where he was born and left his deepest marks: by releasing an album of ersatz Caribbean folk tunes, in 1956, that became one of the first LPs by a solo artist to sell a million copies; by being the first Black man to become a sex symbol for mainstream America; by using his resulting royalties and fame to bankroll Martin Luther King's movement for Civil Rights; by acting as an crucial conduit, as an intimate of Robert Kennedy, between King's movement and the federal government. And that was just his heyday; his American story also includes chapters, later on, as a pathbreaking guest host of The Tonight Show; as the producer of "We Are the World" and of Beat Street; as an elder radical and moral scold who is also well-recalled, by those of us who grew up in the 1970s and '80s, as a genial fixture on Sesame Street.
But it's impossible to understand Belafonte's larger meaning, as not merely an American figure but a diasporic and global one, without understanding his Caribbean roots. The Jamaican village where he stayed with his grandmother as a boy, amid St. Ann's old plantations, was an out-of-the-way corner of a region to whose islands were trafficked the majority of the 10 million enslaved Africans who, between Columbus' arrival and the 1800s, endured the Middle Passage — but also a place, like communities across this region "where globalization began," that's been shaped for centuries by cultural mixing, long-distance trade and the worldly outlook of its people.
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In Harry's old-school politics, the "human family" mattered. But until the end, his worldview was shaped by having traveled between Harlem and Jamaica, and sensing that something profound joined their people. He remained, until his life's end, deeply engaged with the politics and people of Africa — where one of his earliest achievements, after he was asked by John Kennedy to help launch the Peace Corps, involved organizing an airlift from Kenya that included the father of one Barack Obama. That personal tie didn't stop Belafonte from criticizing the moderate policies of America's first Black president — a politician who became a totemic figure to American liberals in ways it's hard to imagine happening if Belafonte, decades earlier and evincing a similar mien and grace, hadn't done so first.
For a deep dive into Belafonte’s life and career—in his own words—check out his autobiography, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance.” Sarah Rodman reviewed it for The Boston Globe in 2011.
‘My Song’ by Harry Belafonte
A life rich in music, acting, activism
Somewhere amid the accounts of when he became the first artist to sell a million copies of an album, the first black leading actor to romance a white leading actress in a major Hollywood film, and the man who was asked to help pick out the clothes that Martin Luther King Jr. would be buried in, you realize just how extraordinary Harry Belafonte’s life has been.
If Belafonte had simply pursued one strand of that life — the immensely popular singer, the Tony Award-winning actor, the powerful political and social activist — it would have made fascinating material for a book. That he managed to cram all three into his 84 years makes “My Song,’’ his captivating memoir written with Michael Shnayerson, not only a sometimes exhausting chronicle of Belafonte’s own story but an intriguing look at US history from the late ’40s to the present.
In 2012, Belafonte discussed his book and life with writer, broadcaster, and documentary filmmaker Sarfraz Manzoor for The Guardian.
From The Guardian video notes:
Singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, 85, tells Sarfraz Manzoor about his life and work in music, cinema and fighting for social equality - as chronicled in a new memoir. He also discusses his friendship with Martin Luther King, his relationship with President John F Kennedy, and the humiliation that led him to become more heavily involved in the fight against racial segregation
The other side of Belafonte’s life—his impact o, and participation in the struggle for civil rights—hadn’t been explored or highlighted much in film until filmmaker Susanne Rostock joined Belafonte and his daughter Gina to produce a feature documentary film in 2011. “Sing Your Song.”
If you don’t have the time right now to watch “Sing Your Song,” here’s a comprehensive review from the “That’s How the Light Gets In” blog.
All of us see the world as it exists; fewer envision what it might look like if made to change; and fewer still try to put together the people and ideas that make change happen. Paul Robeson was one; Martin Luther King, Jr. was one; Bobby Kennedy became one. And, of course, Nelson Mandela. I had just enough vision to see that they were visionaries, and to do what I could to help.
– Harry Belafonte, My Song
The film reveals the key role he played – for example, helping to organise the 1963 March on Washington, and acting as a conduit between Dr. King and the Kennedys, educating them about the situation in the American south and steering them towards a clearer commitment to civil rights. At the heart of this was his close friendship with Martin Luther King, and one of the most moving sequences in the film recounts his personal devastation at Dr. King’s death.
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Sing Your Song integrates original interviews with a wealth of archival material from home movies to newsreels and film and TV snippets. One with which the film illustrates how deeply institutionalised racism was in America at the time occurred when, recording an episode of a TV show in March 1968, Belafonte was singing a duet with Petula Clark and the two touched. Chrysler, the show’s sponsor objected to the ‘interracial touching’ fearing to offend Southern viewers. Both Clark and Belafonte refused to re-shoot the performance.
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Yet another piece of archive footage, probably never seen before now, is of a segment from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS in 1968 in which Belafonte sings ‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ against a backdrop of newsreel footage of police brutality during the protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The entire clip was never aired by CBS and ultimately resulted in the show being cancelled by CBS.
Here’s the official trailer:
Here’s the full film.
In 2024, Rostock followed up “Sing Your Song” with a new film, “Following Harry.”
In Following Harry filmmaker Susanne Rostock joins Harry Belafonte during the last twelve years of his life, as he embarks on a deeply personal and reflective journey, while mentoring an emerging group of artists and activists committed to following in his footsteps and disrupting injustice to implement impactful change.
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In 2011, Harry invited me to share space within his brand-new office located on the top floor of the Martin Luther King Building in Manhattan. In 2012, with the murder of Trayvon Martin, I was given the intimate vantage point of a first-hand witness to Harry’s quest to engage the most influential and expansive minds of the youth, artists, and activists alike. The questions Harry raised, the answers he unearthed and the radical challenges he put forth as to where we are as a nation, as a world, inspired and motivated the next generation of leaders, creators and activists. I felt this could become a blueprint for the future. At this point in Harry’s life, I recognized the film would also be a story of aging, of legacy, of responsibility for what one leaves behind.
iMBD notes that this was the “final appearance of Harry Belafonte. He died on April 25, 2023, after the documentary was completed [but]prior to its release.“
Here’s the “Following Harry” trailer:
Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote an extensive piece on Belafonte for The New Yorker in 1996, which contains some surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) details on Belafonte’s interactions with network television.
Belafonte’s Balancing Act
Negotiating his place in popular culture and his political conscience, Harry Belafonte has made some of the hardest choices in show business.
Belafonte’s involvement with the civil-rights movement in the sixties was no parlor project, and his friendship with King was no celebrity air kiss, either. Belafonte first met King in 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycotts. Though the black clergy’s betrayals of Du Bois and Robeson had left him skeptical of the breed, King won him over by his humility and his earnestness. “I need your help,” King told him. “I have no idea where this movement is going.” An alliance was forged that lasted until King’s death. King was a frequent guest of Belafonte’s in New York, and Belafonte was one of the few who could serve as trusted conduits between King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on the one hand, and the Washington establishment, on the other. He put up the seed money to support the newly founded Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee. He financed a group that included Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, Bob Moses, Jim Foreman, and John Lewis to tour Africa and establish international liaisons there. It was Belafonte who bailed King out of the Birmingham jail, and who raised money to bail out a number of jailed student activists. Belafonte can be oddly reticent at times, and, though he’s obviously proud of the role he played in the civil-rights era, he speaks of these matters with some hesitancy. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, is more forthcoming. She recalls a day in the early sixties when Belafonte told King, laughing, “Martin, one of these days some of these crackers are going to kill you, and I’m going to end up having to take care of your family.” Both things came to pass, Belafonte having insured King’s life heavily for his family’s sake. Mrs. King describes him as a member of King’s small “strategy committee,” a trusted adviser as well as one of the few effective fund-raisers in the movement; and in moments of crisis Belafonte’s friendship with Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, proved invaluable.
Meanwhile, Belafonte held on to his day job, continuing to tour and make television appearances. But TV had its vexations for him, too. In 1960, for example, he received an Emmy for a television special he did for the “Revlon Hour,” called “Tonight with Belafonte.” Since the show was also a hit with viewers, Revlon decided that it was on to a good thing. According to Belafonte, an agreement was reached in which he would be given a million dollars to produce and serve as host of five shows. The second show, featuring black and white luminaries from jazz, folk, and pop, earned raves. Then he was brought up short by reality.
“Now I get called by Charlie Revson to have a meeting,” he told me. “Would I come alone? I can’t wait—I’m figuring he wants to give me half the company, or something. So we’re having lunch in his private dining room, and he’s saying, ‘As a Jew in Jersey City, I understand oppression’—da, da, da, da—‘but we have to talk about the show. Good ratings. Good reviews. Very nice. But we’re getting some response that says you should do it all-black. If you could just take all the white people out . . .’ I couldn’t believe it. And I said, ‘Mr. Revson, let me tell you something. If you’d asked me to put on a flowery shirt and sing more calypso tunes, and dance more, because that’s what white people would like, I would consider it. But what you’ve asked me to do—there’s no way to square it. I cannot become resegregated.’ He said, ‘O.K.’ Four o’clock that afternoon, I had a check for eight hundred thousand dollars. Charlie Revson said, ‘Goodbye. You’re off the air.’ ”
Let’s close with an interview Belafonte did with civil rights activist and journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault for PBS in 2018, which rings powerfully in these days of Donald Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion. He notes not just the need for white folks to step up, but the necessity to pass the torch to young folks.
Thank you and Happy Birthday, Harry. May you rest in peace and power.
Please join me in the comments for more on Belafonte, and the weekly Caribbean News Roundup—and please share your own Belafonte memories.
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