How fortunate we are that we got to see this elegant warrior roll into old age — still committed, still active, still handsome as the day is long.
Indeed, Belafonte’s heart is the natural thing to recall about a life that carried the barrier-breaking calypso singer, who died Tuesday at 96, from childhood poverty to international fame, without ever losing an internal moral compass firmly fixed on helping those in the fringes.
His breakout hit, “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” underscored that focus with lyrics that paid homage to those who labor through the night as others sleep soundly in their beds.
In an “American Masters” interview, Belafonte explained that he sang calypso music to counter the assumption that lilting Caribbean music was about “happy-go-lucky people” and men who “loved to drink and sit onto the coconut trees, lazing their time away.”
“As beautiful and as powerful as ‘The Banana Boat Song’ has become, it was a conscious choice,” he said. “It is a classic work song, it spoke about the struggles of the people who are underpaid, who are the victims of colonialism. And in this song, it talked about our aspirations for a better way of life.”
“Daylight come and me wan’ go home” sure sounded sunny in that call-and-response tune released in 1956. But Belafonte, in his genius, got audiences around the world to happily sing about oppression.
Belafonte was the first Black performer to win an Emmy Award, and the first artist to release an album that sold over 1 million copies. But his legacy reaches far beyond entertainment to the civil rights era, anti-apartheid movement and numerous humanitarian causes. Activism always had top billing in his life story.
And no one should be under any illusions about risks he took and the price he paid for following his convictions.
When I learned of Belafonte’s death, my mind went immediately to his longtime friend Clarence P. Jones, himself 92 and one of the few surviving lions of the civil rights movement. As young men, Jones, who was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal attorney, and Belafonte worked side by side behind the scenes as key strategists and fundraisers for King.
“People don’t appreciate that he put it all on the line when he was at the top of his game,” Jones said.
Belafonte first met King in spring 1956, the year he released the “Calypso” album that kept him at the top of the Billboard charts for a whopping 31 weeks. It was about that time that popular magazines began referring to him as “America’s Negro matinee idol” for his work in film and theater.
In a highly segregated America, Belafonte was a crossover icon, and Jones said that as he became increasingly active in the civil rights movement, promoters and advisers urged him to pull back. “Harry Belafonte provided a bridge to enable America to cross comfortably to the Black community,” Jones said. “He was willing to risk all of that.”
That’s because Belafonte understood that his visibility was key to his power to produce change, whether it was helping people of color gain access to real estate that had been reserved for Whites or enlisting other celebrities to support the civil rights cause.
Belafonte was a key figure, for instance, in organizing a gaggle of Hollywood stars who attended the March on Washington in 1963, including Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Rita Moreno, Paul Newman, Sammy Davis Jr., Marlon Brando, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. In fact, Jones said, Belafonte choreographed the arrival, timing and placement of the Hollywood delegation so it would be seated directly in the path of TV cameras and photographers.
“He knew that at the end of the day, America was a celebrity-struck nation,” said Jones.
That also gets to what separated Belafonte from the phalanx of Hollywood A-listers who endorsed civil rights causes in general: He was no sideline supporter. He worked phones. He walked the pavement. He wrote checks — lots of big checks — to bail out protesters from jail, to help organizations make payroll, to cover the bills of leaders who had given themselves over to the cause.
That visibility made him a target for surveillance. Among many jaw-dropping stories in Belafonte’s 2011 memoir “My Song,” he reveals that at one point his manager and his therapist (a husband-and-wife team) turned out to be FBI informants.
Belafonte also lost friends for supporting leaders and causes that some saw as too strident or radical. In his memoir, he writes about the pain of being disinvited from speaking at Coretta Scott King’s funeral, despite his longtime bond with her family. The current and former U.S. presidents had been invited, and his open support for Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was deemed problematic. Belafonte watched the service on television.
In his memoir, Belafonte makes clear how much that stung. But this was never a man to compromise his convictions to avoid personal pain.
The world met Harry Belafonte because he dedicated his talents to entertainment. The world changed because he dedicated his life to activism.
