![]() “My commitment sustained itself after the war. “The Navy came as a place of relief for me,” Belafonte told Yes! “But I was also driven by the belief that Hitler had to be defeated. “We were instructed to never capitulate, to never yield, to always resist oppression,” Belafonte told Yes! magazine.ĭuring World War II, those principles led him to join the US Navy, which also provided stability after he dropped out of high school. He drew strength from his mother, an uneducated domestic worker, who instilled an activist spirit in him. He had described his father as an abusive drunk who abandoned him and his mother, leaving Belafonte with a longing for a stable family. Early yearsīorn Harold George Bellanfanti in New York’s Harlem neighbourhood, he moved to Jamaica before returning to New York to attend high school. “It gave me a chance to make political commentary, to make social statements, to talk about things that I found that were unpleasant – and things that I found that were inspiring,” he said. A few weeks before the launch, Belafonte told Rolling Stone magazine that singing was a way for him to express injustices in the world. That same month, he compared the US Homeland Security Department with the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.Īn anthology of his music was released to mark Belafonte’s 90th birthday on March 1, 2017. ![]() Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, right-centre, leads a march with Belafonte, left, and others in downtown Atlanta to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act in 2005 īelafonte’s politics made headlines in January 2006 during a trip to Venezuela when he called President George W Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world”. He was a co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington held the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president in January 2017. “I say to them, ‘I was long an activist before I became an artist.'”Įven in his late 80s, Belafonte was still speaking out on race and income equality and urging President Barack Obama to do more to help the poor. “A lot of people say to me, ‘When as an artist did you decide to become an activist?'” Belafonte said in a National Public Radio interview in 2011. We Are the World featured superstars such as Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Diana Ross and raised millions of dollars. After seeing a grim news report on the famine, he wanted to do something similar to the fund-raising song, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, by the British supergroup Band Aid a year earlier. In 2014, he received an Academy Award for his humanitarian work.īelafonte provided the impetus for We Are the World, the 1985 all-star musical collaboration that raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia. ‘We are the world’īelafonte travelled the world as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, in 1987 and later started an AIDS foundation. In the 1960s, he campaigned with King, and in the 1980s, he worked to end apartheid in South Africa and coordinated Nelson Mandela‘s first visit to the US. In 1959’s, Odds Against Tomorrow, Belafonte played a bank robber with a racist partner. In, Island in the Sun, in 1954, his character entertained notions of a relationship with a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, which reportedly triggered threats to burn down theatres in the US South. Belafonte speaks as he accepts the Spingarn Award during the 44th Annual NAACP Image Awards in 2013 ![]() ![]() He was the first Black person allowed to perform in many plush nightspots and also had racial breakthroughs in movies at a time when segregation prevailed in much of the US. Handsome and suave, he came to be known as the “King of Calypso” early in his career. Rebellion is healthy.”īelafonte was born in New York City’s borough of Manhattan but spent his early childhood in his family’s native Jamaica. “I’ve got to be a part of whatever the rebellion is that tries to change all this,” he told the New York Times in 2001. He became the driving force behind the celebrity-studded, famine-fighting hit song, We Are the World, in the 1980s.īelafonte once said he was in a constant state of rebellion that was driven by anger. The cause of Belafonte’s death was congestive heart failure, his longtime spokesperson Ken Sunshine told the Times on Tuesday.Īs a Black leading man who explored racial themes in 1950s movies, Belafonte would later move on to working with his friend Martin Luther King Jr during the United States civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Harry Belafonte, a singer, songwriter and groundbreaking actor who started his entertainment career belting, Day O, in his 1950s hit song “Banana Boat” before turning to political activism, has died at the age of 96, the New York Times reported. ![]()
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