![]() Kennedy, the president’s brother, over the government’s failure to protect the “Freedom Riders” trying to integrate bus stations. He argued with Attorney General Robert F. “He knew the headlines of the day, but he wasn’t really anywhere nuanced or detailed on the depth of Black anguish or what our struggle’s really about.”īelafonte would often criticize the Kennedys for their reluctance to challenge the Southern segregationists who were then a substantial part of the Democratic Party. “I was quite taken by the fact that he (Kennedy) knew so little about the Black community,” Belafonte told NBC in 2013. Belafonte explained King’s importance and arranged for King and Kennedy to meet. Kennedy, at a time when Black voters were as likely to support Republicans as they would Democrats, was so anxious for his support that during the 1960 election he visited Belafonte at his Manhattan home. The Kennedys were among the first politicians to seek his opinions, which he willingly shared. “I realized that the movement was more important than anything else.” “I was having almost daily talks with Martin,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir “My Song,” published in 2011. ![]() By the early 1960s, he had decided to make civil rights his priority. They spoke for hours, and Belafonte would remember feeling King raised him to the “higher plane of social protest.” Then at the peak of his singing career, Belafonte was soon producing a benefit concert for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that helped make King a national figure. “Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you.”īelafonte befriended King in the spring of 1956 after the young civil rights leader called and asked for a meeting. “Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it,” Dylan later wrote. Admirers of Belafonte included a young Bob Dylan, who debuted on record in the early ’60s by playing harmonica on Belafonte’s “Midnight Special.” His “Calypso,” released in 1955, became the first officially certified million-selling album by a solo performer, and started a national infatuation with Caribbean rhythms (Belafonte was nicknamed, reluctantly, the “King of Calypso″). The 1957 movie “Island in the Sun” was banned in several Southern cities, where theater owners were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan because of the film’s interracial romance between Belafonte and Joan Fontaine. In 1954, he co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge in the Otto Preminger-directed musical “Carmen Jones,” a popular breakthrough for an all-Black cast. He won a Tony Award in 1954 for his starring role in John Murray Anderson’s “Almanac” and five years later became the first Black performer to win an Emmy for the TV special “Tonight with Harry Belafonte.” He was ever engaged and unyielding, willing to take on Southern segregationists, Northern liberals, the billionaire Koch brothers and the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whom Belafonte would remember asking to cut him “some slack.”īelafonte responded, “What makes you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?”īelafonte had been a major artist since the 1950s. In Spike Lee’s 2018 film “BlacKkKlansman,” he was fittingly cast as an elder statesman schooling young activists about the country’s past.īelafonte’s friend, civil rights leader Andrew Young, would note that Belafonte was the rare person to grow more radical with age. He risked his life and livelihood and set high standards for younger Black celebrities, scolding Jay-Z and Beyoncé for failing to meet their “social responsibilities,” and mentoring Usher, Common, Danny Glover and many others. Martin Luther King Jr., often intervening on his behalf with both politicians and fellow entertainers and helping him financially. He worked closely with his friend and generational peer the Rev. ![]() Few kept up with his time and commitment and none his stature as a meeting point among Hollywood, Washington and the Civil Rights Movement.īelafonte not only participated in protest marches and benefit concerts, but helped organize and raise support for them. With his glowing, handsome face and silky-husky voice, Belafonte was one of the first Black performers to gain a wide following on film and to sell a million records as a singer many still know him for his signature hit “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” and its call of “Day-O! Daaaaay-O.” But he forged a greater legacy once he scaled back his performing career in the 1960s and lived out his hero Paul Robeson’s decree that artists are “gatekeepers of truth.”īelafonte stands as the model and the epitome of the celebrity activist.
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