Harry Belafonte, who fueled an international calypso craze in the 1950s with his version of the “Banana Boat Song” and whose long career in show business paralleled his off-stage role as a civil rights activist, has died in New York.
Harry Belafonte, the award-winning entertainer who fueled an international calypso craze in the 1950s with his version of the “Banana Boat Song” and whose long career in show business paralleled his off-stage role as a civil rights activist and globe-trotting humanitarian, has died in New York.
In 1954, he became the first Black man to win a Tony Award — for best featured actor in a musical for his performance in the Broadway revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac” and six years later the first Black person to win an Emmy, for his performance in “The Revlon Revue: Tonight With Belafonte.” “As far as Black entertainers were concerned, Belafonte in many ways seemed to be a startling new kind of figure,” said Donald Bogle, a culture critic and author of numerous books on Black Americans in film and television. “There hadn’t been somebody quite like him on the scene.”Sidney Poitier, who made history as the first Black man to win an Oscar for lead actor and who starred in ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ has died.
After making his movie debut in 1953 as a Southern school principal opposite Dandridge’s teacher in “Bright Road,” Belafonte starred with the actress in the hit 1954 musical “Carmen Jones.” But, Bogle said, “Belafonte in movies was never what he was on television in terms of his impact, in part because of the compromises of the scripts and his own persona. He didn’t have that kind of magnetism on the big screen.”
As his fame and fortune grew in the 1950s, the singer-actor devoted increasing amounts of his time and money to supporting the emerging civil rights movement. Belafonte, who was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 1987, was a 1989 recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor. said the entertainer “has given nobly and unselfishly to the cause of making our country a better place and our planet a better world. Many great artists have a conscience too, but none greater than his.
Explaining the original “Banana Boat Song” in a 1993 interview with the New York Times, he said: “That song is a way of life. It’s a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica. It’s a classic work song.” When their mother was unable to find a job in Jamaica, she returned to New York and left her two sons behind to attend school. Belafonte’s parents were legally separated by 1940 and his mother brought him and his brother back to New York to live with her.
The play, about Black servicemen returning home to Harlem, was the first he’d ever seen, and it changed his life.
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