{"id":5019,"date":"2023-05-01T18:50:52","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T18:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/?p=5019"},"modified":"2023-05-02T18:59:55","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T18:59:55","slug":"harry-belafonte-jamaican-american-singer-actor-activist-dies-at-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/?p=5019","title":{"rendered":"Harry Belafonte, Jamaican-American Singer, Actor, Activist, Dies at 96"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harry Belafonte, the Jamaican-American singer, actor, and political activist, died aged 96 on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His longtime publicist Ken Sunshine said Belafonte died of congestive heart failure at his Manhattan, New York home, his wife Pamela Frank beside him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Belafonte is most widely known for his hit songs \u201cDay-O (The Banana Boat Song,\u201d \u201cJump in the Line (Shake, Se\u00f1ora),\u201d and \u201cJamaica Farewell,\u201d released in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. His third studio album, \u201cCalypso\u201d (1956), stayed at the top of the Billboard chart for 31 weeks, and was the first album by one artist to sell over one million copies within a year. Three years later, he was the highest-paid Black performer in history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Twitter, President Biden\u00a0eulogized<\/a>\u00a0this \u201cgroundbreaking American who used his talent and voice to help redeem the soul of our nation. Harry Belafonte\u2019s accomplishments are legendary and his legacy of outspoken advocacy, compassion, and respect for dignity will endure forever.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Harlem in 1927 to Jamaican-born parents Harold George Bellanfanti Sr., a chef, and Melvine, a housekeeper, he lived from age five to 13 with his grandmother in Kingston, Jamaica. He returned to New York to attend George Washington High School, dropped out for reasons of dyslexia and delinquency, and served in the Navy during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though a calypso, folk, gospel, and blues musician, Belafonte was also a stage, TV and film actor from the 1940s through the 2010s. In 1954, when Black faces on Broadway beyond what he deemed \u201cUncle Tom\u201d roles were few and far between, he won a Tony award for starring in the musical revue \u201cJohn Murray Anderson\u2019s Almanac.\u201d In 1959, he became the first Black performer to win an Emmy for the TV show \u201cTonight with Harry Belafonte.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Twitter, Mia Farrow bid farewell<\/a> to this \u201cbeautiful singer, brilliant and brave civil rights activist, a deeply moral and caring man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rapper Ice Cube called him<\/a> \u201cmore than a singer, more than an actor and more than a man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The activist and football quarterback Colin Kaeperinick quoted Belafonte himself,\u00a0writing<\/a>\u00a0\u201cMovements don\u2019t die, because struggle doesn\u2019t die.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Belafonte\u2019s boundary-breaking success continued in Hollywood. His first lead role, in Robert Rossen\u2019s drama \u201cIsland in the Sun\u201d (1957) alongside Joan Fontaine, was part of the first interracial romance between a Black man and a white woman in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although his acting career continued as late as Spike Lee\u2019s Oscar-winning \u201cBlacKkKlansman\u201d (2018), in which he fittingly played an aging political activist, Belafonte devoted himself to civil rights from the late 1950s on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside his mentor \u2014 the singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson \u2014 he counted among his friends Sidney Poitier, Joan Baez, Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., who Belafonte bailed out of jail in 1963.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

King\u2019s daughter, Bernice King, shared on Twitter a photo of Belafonte at her father\u2019s funeral, and said the icon \u201cshowed up for my family in very compassionate ways.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Belafonte co-organized the 1963 March on Washington that featured King\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech; was a main funder of the Freedom Riders, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and King\u2019s Southern Christian Leadership Conference; maintained an insurance policy on King\u2019s life; and donated money to King\u2019s family after the civil rights leader was assassinated in 1968.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In later decades Belafonte won a Kennedy Center Honor (1989), the National Medal of Arts (1994), and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (2000). He organized the four-time Grammy-winning charity single \u201cWe Are the World\u201d (1985) by the supergroup USA for Africa, raising over $63 million dollars for famine relief; was appointed as a goodwill ambassador to UNICEF in 1987; and visited countries across Africa from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s for causes of peace, HIV\/AIDS relief, anti-apartheid, and literacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well into his ninth decade, Belafonte\u2019s life reflected what he told the New York Times in 1959: \u201cIf there is no change we might just as well go back to the first \u2018ugh,\u2019 which must have been the first song.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: Published without changes from Ethic Media Services<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Selen Ozturk Harry Belafonte, the Jamaican-American singer, actor, and political activist, died aged 96 on Tuesday. His<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5020,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,8,24],"tags":[66,193,192],"class_list":["post-5019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-black-history","category-online-newspaper","category-regular-column","tag-african-american","tag-black-history","tag-music"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5021,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019\/revisions\/5021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}