Harry Belafonte, the celebrated actor, singer, and activist, has died. He was 96.
“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 ,” 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.
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 ofThe play inspired him to join the A.N.T., where he met lifelong friend and fellow West Indian Sidney Poitier. On the G.I.
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.
He won two Grammys for his folk recordings . 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, andTonight with BelafonteHis 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.
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