Singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte has died at the age of 96, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Belafonte - who started his entertainment career ‘belting ‘Day O’ in his 1950s hit song ‘Banana Boat’ before turning to political activism - is understood to have died at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his spokesman reportedly told the NYT.
Born Harold George Bellanfanti in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, Bellafonte moved to his family’s native Jamaica before returning to New York to attend high school.
Handsome and suave, he came to be known as the “King of Calypso” early in his career.
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 United States.
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 theaters in the American South. In 1959’s “Odds Against Tomorrow” Belafonte played a bank robber with a racist partner.
After exploring racial themes as a leading actor in 1950s movies, Belafonte later moved on to campaigning with his friend Martin Luther King Jr during the US civil rights movement in the early 1960s.
In the 1980s, he worked to end apartheid in South Africa and coordinated Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the United States.
Belafonte traveled the world as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, in 1987 and later started an AIDS foundation. In 2014 he received an Academy Award for his humanitarian work.
In the 1980s, Belafonte provided the impetus for “We Are the World,” the 1985 all-star musical collaboration that raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia. 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.
“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.
“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. “I say to them, ‘I was long an activist before I became an artist.’”
Belafonte once said he was in a constant state of rebellion that was driven by anger.
“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. “The anger is a necessary fuel. Rebellion is healthy.”
Belafonte was the first Black performer to win a major Emmy in 1960 with his appearance on a television variety special. He also won Grammy Awards in 1960 and 1965 and received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2000 but voiced frustration at the limits on Black artists in show business.
Belafonte was married three times. He and his first wife Marguerite Byrd had two children, including actress-model Shari Belafonte. He also had two children with second wife Julia Robinson, a former dancer.
More to follow.
