Belafonte, Harry

Source:

 African American National Biography

Belafonte, Harry

(1 Mar. 1927– ),

singer, actor, activist, and producer, was born Harold George Belafonte Jr. in Harlem in New York City, the son of Harold George Belafonte Sr., a seaman, and Melvine Love, a domestic worker. Belafonte Sr. was an alcoholic who contributed little to family life, other than occasionally hitting his spouse, and the young Harry was brought up almost exclusively by his mother. Harold and Melvine, who were both from the Caribbean, had a difficult time adjusting to life in New York, and after the Harlem race riots of 1935, Melvine and her son moved to her native Jamaica, where Harry spent five years shielded from American racism. When World War II broke out, the Belafontes returned to Harlem. Hoping for better conditions, the family would often try to pass for white. With white relatives on both the mother's and father's sides, they were all fair-skinned enough to be taken for Greek, Italian, or even Irish. Duty bound, Belafonte joined local gangs, drafted to help defend his white enclaves from neighboring blacks.

Belafonte attended school in Harlem, but struggled with dyslexia; by ninth grade he had had enough and dropped out. Soon thereafter he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was assigned to an all-black unit. Because of his race—and his temper—Belafonte was assigned as a munitions loader, one of the most dangerous jobs on the home front. “The men who were stuck with munitions loading were very bitter, very angry,” he recalls. “In our bitterness and anger we went out and got drunk. We wanted to beat up everybody we met, including each other” (Eldridge, 117–118). When feeling less pugilistic, Belafonte discovered a passion for politics. He enjoyed sitting in on discussions of race and racism in the United States and labored to understand pamphlets and essays by W. E. B. Du Bois.

Belafonte met his first wife, Margurite Byrd, while his unit was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Byrd was studying psychology at the nearby Hampton Institute; she remembers their early relationship as “one long argument over racial issues” (Gates, 160). Belafonte and Byrd married in 1948 and had their first child, Adrienne, a year later. By this time, Belafonte had finished his tour of duty and moved his family to New York. Here, at Harlem's American Negro Theatre (ANT), Belafonte saw a play that sparked his interest in acting. With support from the GI Bill, he was soon enrolled in a workshop at the New School for Social Research, together with Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, and Bea Arthur. Working as a janitor's assistant to help pay the bills, Belafonte volunteered backstage at the ANT. This quickly led to a role in a production of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock.

It was also at the ANT that Belafonte met Sidney Poitier, another black actor of Caribbean extraction, who became a lifelong friend and who, some say, stole Belafonte's career. The two were almost exact contemporaries and competed for many of the same roles. In a 1948 show called Days of Our Youth, Poitier was working as Belafonte's understudy. When Belafonte could not perform one night owing to his janitorial duties, Poitier filled in. A producer happened to be in the audience that evening and approached Poitier after the show. It was the actor's big break, the one that eventually landed him in Hollywood.

Belafonte soldiered on in the theater, but slowly began to turn his attention toward music. On a friend's suggestion he performed at amateur night at a midtown club called the Royal Roost and was immediately hired full time. His performance consisted of pop jazz standards, a repertoire Belafonte found less than edifying; after a year he called it quits. By this time he had saved up a tidy sum of money, and he used it to open a grill called the Sage in Greenwich Village. The restaurant folded after eight months, but during that time it had served Belafonte as a late-night rehearsal space. Belafonte began indulging his interest in folk music at the Sage, and, after it closed, he pursued his research at a more conventional venue, listening to field recordings in the Library of Congress.

Harry Belafonte, singer, civil rights advocate, and Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. Children's Fund, at a school in the Guediyawe district, Dakar, Senegal, 24 February 2004. (AP Images.)

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In 1951 Belafonte brought his new act to the stage. Folk hardly seemed a promising genre at the height of the McCarthy era, when many of its left-leaning practitioners such as Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger were blacklisted, but success came quickly, with sell-out crowds at big-name clubs and a recording contract from RCA. Harry Belafonte's voice alone cannot account for his success, but combined with his stage persona—tight trousers, open shirt, and shiny, mocha skin—it wowed audiences. Belafonte sang the expected folk standards, but then veered off toward African, Caribbean, and even Hebrew songs like “Hava Nageela.” (He claims most American Jews learned the tune from him.) In spite of his success, Belafonte suffered the same indignities as other black entertainers of the day and was routinely denied the right to eat or sleep at the same venues that paid dearly to book his act. But Belafonte was quick to have revenge; in 1954, after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation unconstitutional, he cancelled his engagements in the South.

Belafonte released several folk albums, but it was not until 1956 that he fully embraced the Caribbean music that delighted his audiences. Harry Belafonte—Calypso proved an instant classic, and two songs in particular, “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” topped the charts. Some claimed Belafonte had bastardized true Trinidadian calypso, but Belafonte was unapologetic about tailoring the music to American audiences. It was clearly an astute commercial move; in a year's time the album had sold 1.5 million copies, more than any previous record by a single artist.

As audiences grew and shows sold out, Belafonte resumed acting, taking roles in films and plays, including John Murray Anderson's Broadway revue Almanac, which earned him a Tony Award. Perhaps his most personally significant performance was in Carmen Jones (1954), an all-black film version of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen that also starred Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey. Belafonte and Marguerite Byrd's second daughter, Shari, was born in 1954, but Belafonte's marriage ended in divorce in 1957. That same year he married Julie Robinson, a dancer with the Katherine Dunham Company, with whom he would later have a son, David, and a daughter, Gina. Initially, Belafonte's divorce slipped under the media's radar screen, but word of his remarriage eventually did get out, not least because his new bride was white.

Belafonte continued to act, including a role in 1957's Island in the Sun, a controversial tale of interracial love, but he found himself increasingly put off by Hollywood's ham-fisted attempts to deal with race. The scripts that came his way ranged from the shallow to the offensive, and Belafonte seemed unable to get any of his own ideas produced. In the 1960s he abandoned the cinema and engrossed himself in politics.

Belafonte had met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott and was immediately taken with King's passion and candor. At that first meeting, King seemed uncertain about the fate of the civil rights movement. He asked Belafonte for support, and over the next decade Belafonte lent his name and energy to the cause. He proved instrumental in rallying celebrities at home and abroad, forging political connections, and organizing fund-raisers. Belafonte also devoted large sums of his own money, heavily insuring King's life and bailing out activists arrested during sit-ins and protest marches. When King was jailed in Birmingham, it was Belafonte who led the charge to raise the fifty-thousand-dollar bail. His efforts earned him a place on the board of directors of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Over the years of their joint involvement, Belafonte and King developed a close personal friendship, which lasted until King's death in 1968.

After the civil rights movement began to wane, Belafonte shifted his focus to Africa. His appointment by President John F. Kennedy as a cultural adviser to the Peace Corps in 1961 had first sparked his interest, and through the coming decades he devoted boundless energy to campaigns for development aid and human rights. Chief among these was the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, which consumed Belafonte in the 1980s. In 1987 the United Nations Children's Fund recognized his efforts and made him a goodwill ambassador, a position he has used to draw attention to famine, war, and the plague of AIDS.

Belafonte's activism often drew on his connections in the entertainment world. For a week in 1968 he guest hosted Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, turning light entertainment into politics with guests like Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In his anti-apartheid efforts, he worked to introduce exiled South African musicians like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela to listeners in the United States, and in 1988 he released Paradise in Gazankulu, his own album of South African–themed music. In 1985 Belafonte took a similar approach to relief efforts for famine in Ethiopia. Inspired by pop stars from the British Isles who launched Band Aid in 1984, Belafonte was the driving force behind “We Are the World,” an American effort in 1985 which raised over $70 million in aid for Ethiopian famine victims.

Perhaps because his political and show-business interests have always been so entwined, Belafonte has never been forced to choose between the two. In the thick of the anti-apartheid movement, he resumed acting and found time to mount major concert tours. Earlier, at the height of the civil rights movement, Belafonte had begun what may be his most ambitious musical project, a series of records then called Anthology of Negro Folk Music. He wanted to showcase the richness and variety of the African American musical tradition with a collection that included work songs and spirituals, minstrel tunes and lullabies. But when recording was completed in 1971, the backers of the project, RCA and Reader's Digest, pulled out, citing lack of commercial prospects, and the tapes languished in RCA vaults. They were finally released in 2001 as The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music and were nominated for a Grammy Award for best historical album.

The release of Long Road topped off a flurry of show-business activity by Belafonte in the 1990s. In 1995 he starred in the independent film White Man's Burden and the following year played the gangster Seldom Seen in Robert Altman's Kansas City. Plans were afoot for Belafonte to produce yet another picture with an unusual take on race—a film version of Amos 'n Andy, the long-running radio and television show that was criticized by the NAACP, among others, for perpetuating racist stereotypes, but which nonetheless enjoyed a substantial audience among African Americans from the 1920s to the 1950s. After a short hiatus from film acting at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Belafonte returned to the big screen in 2006 with a role in Emilio Estevez's Bobby, a film about Senator Robert Kennedy.

Belafonte has also continued to play sold-out shows and has campaigned to raise awareness about prostate health among African American men and the need to curb gang violence. He provoked controversy, however, in a much-criticized 15 October 2002 appearance on CNN's Larry King Live, when he refused to apologize for his earlier denunciation of Secretary of State Colin Powell as President George W. Bush's “house slave.” Powell called Belafonte's comments “an unfortunate throwback to another time and another place,” but the entertainer insisted that the secretary of state was a “sell-out.” Asked by King if the same term applied to Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, Belafonte replied, “Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Even more so.” Belafonte continued his polemics against the Bush administration in subsequent years. In January 2006, the Associated Press reported that during a meeting with Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, Belafonte commented that Bush was “the greatest terrorist in the world.”

In the final analysis, Harry Belafonte remains difficult to pigeonhole either as an activist or as an entertainer, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Whether his greatest achievements have taken place onstage or off remains open to debate; his success in both arenas does not.

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