Harry Belafonte, the legendary civil rights champion, singer and movie star, has died aged 96.
Belafonte, whose memory is closely associated with the political and social activism of Martin Luther King, Jr, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, has ranked visual art and artists as the top sources of inspiration for his civil rights work and in the many creative collaborations he has engaged in. to help the cause of black and disadvantaged people in the United States and around the world.
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, said in a statement “it joins the world in mourning the loss of a civil rights activist, a cultural icon and its 1999 Freedom Award winner, Mr. .Harry Belafonte”.
“From his early years of meteoric rise to stardom in the 1950s,” the museum said, “he was connected to the American civil rights movement and put his money where he was by funding the efforts of organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee He was among the powerhouse list of Hollywood celebrities who attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 60 years ago.
Much of what I understood as an activist was learned from artists who came before me and who strongly influenced my beliefs.
Harry Belafonte
In an interview with Forbes magazine in 2018, Belafonte explained his belief that artists “have always been there” for social causes. “Go back to Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, if you go back to a lot of art, not just the performing arts, but certainly a lot of artists like Picasso and others who have always been deeply involved in social causes or social interests, from an activism perspective, artists, in my experience, have always been there,” he said. “A lot of what I’ve learned, as a activist, was learned from the artists who came before me and who strongly influenced my beliefs.”
Carl van Vechten, portrait of Harry Belafonte, February 18, 1954 Library of Congress/Public Domain
His huge success as a folk singer – with the 1953 single Matilda and then his album Calypso (1956), was said to have been the first to sell a million copies – and as a film actor, and his charismatic beauty, made him one of the most photographed people of his time, notably by Carl van Vachten. Her friend and fellow folk singer and social activist Joan Baez painted a portrait of Belafonte in 2017, after more than 50 years of friendship. “He was the first singer I heard in folk music, before Pete Seeger and Odetta,” she wrote at the time. “I couldn’t have known at that early age that we would end up walking with Dr. King.” Of the portrait, she added, “It’s the simplest portrait I’ve ever painted. It’s so…beautiful.”
Belafonte’s success also gave him the resources and profile to make a profound contribution to the civil rights movement, especially after he met King in 1956, becoming one of its key supporters, providing King with a home in his New York apartment and bailing it out. get out of jail on occasion. Belafonte financially and personally supported King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and her children after King’s assassination in 1968.
The Kings’ youngest daughter, barrister and minister Bernice King, recalled: “When I was a child, Harry Belafonte showed up for my family in a very compassionate way.” She posted an image of Belafonte supporting Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral, writing: “Here he is grieving with my mum at my dad’s funeral service at Morehouse College. I won’t forget…Rest well sir .”
The visual artist with whom Belafonte is most closely associated is Chicago-born cartoonist Charles White. They first met in 1947 at a meeting of the Committee for Negroes in the Arts. At the time of a 2018 retrospective of White’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Belafonte recalled the day: “I had just come out of the war and uh, I had no identity. I walked into a place that just blew my mind. A lot of Blacks gathered in a room making noise and talking and looking like they had a purpose in life… The purpose was to advance black culture It was to become major players in the scene American culture. We could come together and debate and figure out what the collective The Power of Black Art could do. It was the center of rebellious thought, of glorious thought, and the leaders of that were people like Charlie White and Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.
Belafonte became a collector of White’s workthen in 1957, when Belafonte, then a huge pop star, was offered an hour of primetime television to host, he commissioned White to do a picture –Folksinger (Voice of Jericho: Portrait of Harry Belafonte) 1957 – for use in the show.
As Belafonte recounted 60 years later: “I couldn’t find enough ways to expose the world to Charlie. I was so taken with his work. I said that in this special, not only would they hear the beauty of the songs, but the audience would have a visual experience – not just a setting – but something that was filled with passion. It shook television because they’ve never really seen anything like this, all this darkness. It was amazing.”
Born in New York, to a father born in Martinique and a mother born in Jamaica, Belafonte grew up in Harlem but spent from 1936 to 1940 on his mother’s native island before reuniting with the rest of his family in New York. After serving in the United States Navy he began performing in New York and his growing stardom as a singer and actor meant he was a natural choice for the gala Frank Sinatra had planned for the inauguration of President John F Kennedy in 1961.
In 1963, Belafonte rallied his Hollywood colleagues including Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, James Garner and his friend Sidney Poitier to witness the conclusion of the March on Washington, when King delivered his immortal “I have a dream” speech. at the Lincoln Memorial. The following year, James Baldwin reflected in The uses of the blues (1964) on the fact that little had changed: “The fact that Harry Belafonte makes as much money as, say, Frank Sinatra, really means nothing in this context. Frank can still have a house anywhere, and Harry can’t. People go to see Harry and line up to watch him. They love him on stage, or at a cocktail party, but they don’t want him to marry their daughters. It has nothing to do with Harry; it has everything to do with America.”
Memoirs of Belafonte My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Challenge (2012) is a vivid and beautifully written account of a busy and consequential life. After the March on Washington and the publication of Baldwin’s The uses of the blueshe still had six decades of campaigning ahead of him, most recently urging people to vote in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections.
In the 1980s he supported the cultural boycott of South Africa and participated in famine relief efforts in Africa, performing at the 1985 Live Aid concert in London and recording the fundraising single of All-Star We Are the World fund. In 2013, talking about the record and preparing for his 30th birthday, he returned to the theme of the role of the artist in society. “People who represent art have the public’s trust,” he said. “I think people who listen to our songs and look at our paintings trust us. And that’s a huge gift. often the public will respond.”
- Harold George Bellanfanti (Belafonte); born in New York on March 1, 1927; married in 1948 Marguerite Byrd (marriage dissolved in 1957); 1957 Julie Robinson (marriage dissolved 2004), 2008 Pamela Frank; National Medal of Arts 1994; died on April 25, 2023 in New York
