“The most powerful weapon that we have in the universe is the weapon of art,” Harry Belafonte told a social-activist teen theater troupe in Harlem in 2014. Like few other stars, Belafonte leveraged his talent, fame, and fortune to serve his human-rights activism. His most popular song, “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” was about the plight of third-world dockworkers. He was a celebrated actor onstage, on-screen, and on TV, but his performances were always done with an eye toward how he could help the cause. He retired from performing as he entered his ninth decade but never halted his activism until his death on April 24 at the age of 96, as reported by The New York Times.
He was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in Harlem on March 1, 1927, the son of West Indian parents who were both immigrants. His father, who was from Martinique, had been a cook in the British Royal Navy. His mother, a housemaid, was from Jamaica. Fearing that Harry was already turning into a delinquent at age nine she sent him to live with his grandmother in Jamaica from 1936 to 1939.
Back in New York, Harry dropped out of school in the ninth grade and enlisted in the Navy at 17, serving as a munitions loader in the waning days of World War II. Working in New York as an assistant janitor, he finally found direction when he received, as a tip, a ticket to the American Negro Theater’s production of Home Is the Hunter. The play inspired him to join the A.N.T., where he met lifelong friend and fellow West Indian Sidney Poitier. On the G.I. Bill, he also studied drama at Manhattan’s New School, where his classmates included Poitier, Marlon Brando, and Tony Curtis.
With roles scarce for black actors, Belafonte found regular work as a singer. His musical career would eventually encompass every form of African-American popular music, from blues to gospel to hip-hop. He began as a jazz singer, backed by no less than bebop titans Charlie Parker and Max Roach, but he found fame singing folk songs he had learned from the archives of the Library of Congress. An engagement at the legendary Village Vanguard led to both a Broadway appearance in the 1953 musical revue John Murray Anderson’s Almanac—making him the first black actor to win a Tony—and a record contract with RCA.
His 1956 album Calypso was the first LP by an individual artist to sell 1 million copies (it was technically the first to go platinum, though the certification wouldn’t be introduced until two decades later) and is widely credited with launching a vogue for the Trinidadian music of the same name. The album led off with what would become Belafonte’s signature tune, “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” a Jamaican work song sung by night-shift fruit loaders. Other Belafonte hits of the era included “Matilda,” “Jump in the Line,” and “Jamaica Farewell.”
He won two Grammys for his folk recordings (and years later, in 2000, a Grammy lifetime-achievement award). Popular with both white and black audiences, Belafonte made a point of refusing to perform in the Jim Crow South, maintaining the embargo from 1954 to 1961.
After Poitier, Belafonte became the only other black leading man in Hollywood in the 1950s. He starred opposite Dorothy Dandridge in the all-black musical Carmen Jones (1954), though, incredibly, he did not get to sing in the film. (He was deemed not “operatic” enough to sing the film’s music, adapted from Georges Bizet’s Carmen, so he only lip-synched.)
His other films of the 1950s included Bright Road, Island in the Sun (which raised eyebrows with its hint of a thwarted inter-racial romance between the characters played by Belafonte and Joan Fontaine), Odds Against Tomorrow (the first film from Belafonte’s company Harbel, the first black-run production shingle in Hollywood), and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. He conquered TV, too, with a 1959 special, Tonight with Belafonte with The Revlon Revue, which made him the first African-American to win an Emmy.
His success in Hollywood during those years of McCarthyism was even more impressive considering that he’d briefly been blacklisted, having been a protégé of and opening act for singer and openly communist activist Paul Robeson and having often appeared at rallies for progressive causes. Belafonte denied having been a member of the Communist Party, and stalwart anti-communist Ed Sullivan vouched for him by booking Belafonte to sing several times on his popular TV show. Still, his socialist worldview was always apparent and something for which he never apologized. “Harry Belafonte was radical long before it was chic,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. once said, “and remained so long after it wasn’t.”
In the 1960s, Belafonte gave career boosts to such singer-activists as South Africa’s Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, as well as Minnesota’s Bob Dylan, whose first released recording was as a harmonica player on Belafonte’s Midnight Special album (1962). But he spent much of the 1960s actively engaged in the Civil Rights movement.
