Harry Belafonte, internationally famous singer, charismatic actor and benchmark of the era of the fight for civil rights in the United States, has died this Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side, in Manhattan, according to a spokesman. The cause of death was heart failure. He was 96 years old.
Belafonte made history of show business in the fifties, when he broke all racial barriers to climb to the top of the business as the “king of calypso”. The son of West Indian immigrants raised in the poorest part of Harlem, he drew from his roots music to win over audiences with a silky, irresistible voice on hit songs like The Banana Boat Song (and his unmistakable, haunting scream, “Day-O”), included on the album Calypso (1956), Matilda either Island in the Suntitled as the film (in which he shared the bill in 1957 with Joan Fontaine, once the law decriminalized interracial relationships on the screen. Few musicians were capable of disputing his place at the top of the Olympus of fame at that time.
Once inside the system, a club in which he was accepted thanks to his image of sex symbol, He changed the script that they had prepared for him and used all his capital to change things, from the stage, the cinema and television. He always remained faithful to two of his maxims. “The role of art is not to show life, but to teach us what that life should be like.” And: “I am not an artist who became an activist, but an activist who decided to become an artist.”
As part of that quest, he worked closely with the Rev. Marin Luther King Jr. for black equality in the United States in the 1960s just as hard as he engaged in the fight against apartheid two decades later in South Africa.
The years did not take a toll on their commitment; he was always willing to intervene in the public discourse of a country that he saw change, but not enough. He criticized George Bush Jr. for his unjustified war in Iraq as much as he did Obama, because behind his image, “elegant and intellectual”, was hidden in his opinion a person with little empathy for the dispossessed, “black or white”.
One of his last appearances, before his health deteriorated irreparably, was in 2018, in the film BlacKkKlansmanby Spike Lee, in which he played an elderly civil rights leader recounting the judicial prosecution and brutal lynching of Jesse Washington, a black teenager, in Waco, Texas, in 1916.
Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born in New York in 1927, as the son of a cook born in Martinique, and a domestic worker from Jamaica, a country in which the boy lived between the ages of eight and 13.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, the young man enlisted, thanks to the help to study that war veterans received at that time, in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research, where he received the teachings of the Method , by Lee Strasberg, and coincided with Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau and Sidney Poitier. The latter, another symbol of the struggle of African-Americans to make their way into American culture, would become a great friend for decades until Poitier’s death at the age of 94 separated them in January 2022. In 1970, both embarked in a company to help produce films in which actors and directors were black.
In those early fifties, Belafonte spent his nights singing jazz, pop and folk classics, which passed through the sieve of his ancestors, in New York venues such as the Village Vanguard. It was in that mythical jazz venue, still active, where he was discovered by an executive from the RCA Victor label. With them, he signed a recording contract in 1952.
His opinions, certainly radical in that country and at that time, did not affect his fame, nor his ability to obtain prestigious recognition. She got three Grammy Awards, a Emmy and a tony, as well as the National Congressional Medal of Arts, in 1994. Belafonte also received the 2014 Honorary Oscar.
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