Harry Belafonte, the dashing singer, actor and activist who became an indispensable supporter of the civil rights movement, has died, his publicist Ken Sunshine told CNN.
,” which assembled a constellation of pop and rock stars, including Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, to raise money for famine relief in Africa.
Belafonte dropped out of high school and enlisted in the US Navy in 1944. He was relegated to manual labor on the ship and didn’t see combat, but the experience proved to be profound. He met college educated Black men who gave him a wider exposure to the world, talking to him about big issues such as segregation and colonialism. The experience of fighting against facism abroad while coming back to segregation at home angered Belafonte, much like many Black veterans from World War II.
Belafonte also looked for a way to merge his activism with his career and found a mentor and friend in Paul Robeson. The Black stage and film actor was a renaissance man, a star athlete and Ivy League-educated intellectual who became an outspoken civil rights activist and a critic of US foreign policy. Robeson was eventually blacklisted for his activism during the McCarthy era.“For me, Mr. Robeson was the sparrow.
He risked more than his career at times. In 1964, Belafonte and his friend and fellow actor Sidney Poitier traveled to Mississippi to deliver a doctor’s bag filled with $70,000 to support voter registration efforts. Belafonte says the pair were chased and shot at by the Ku Klux Klan but eventually succeeded in hand-delivering their money.
King was a self-contained man in public who rarely let his guard down. But in rare photos that capture King breaking into a huge, uninhibited grin, Belafonte is often at his side, hugging him and sharing some private joke. There is a marvelous YouTube clip showing King telling a joke to Belafonte when the entertainer filled in as a host on “The Tonight Show.”
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