Harry Belafonte

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Harry Belafonte (born 1927), triumphed over a difficult childhood and racial barriers, as an African American growing up in the United States. His songs were extremely popular in middle class American households in the mid-1950s, and helped to popularize calypso music throughout the world.

Harry Belafonte stands out as one of the best-loved singers and entertainers of the 20th century. His dream began in December 1945, when he saw his first play and enrolled in acting classes with Marlon Brando and Walter Matthau. In 1949, he sang for the first time at New York's Royal Roost. This appearance opened the way to his first recording contract. Later, a two-week singing engagement at the Village Vanguard, a showcase for the premier blues, jazz, and folk artists of the 1950s and 1960s, was extended to 14-weeks. From that point, both Hollywood and Broadway took notice. Belafonte made an impact on screen, in addition to his recordings and stage performance. These achievements assisted him in his most vital passion: the civil rights cause. However much he loved to sing or act, Belafonte was most grateful for the access it gave him to large audiences, with whom he could make the biggest impact. By the end of the 1990s, he worked as a director and producer on film projects, breaking racial barriers and creating new opportunities for African Americans in the entertainment industry.

Two Marriages, Many Different Lives

Harold George Belafonte, Jr. was born in New York City, on March 1, 1927. He was baptized as an infant into the Roman Catholic faith. His father, Harold, Sr., was from the Caribbean island of Martinique, in the French West Indies. His mother, Melvine Love, was from Jamaica. Both were products of racially mixed marriages. In Arnold Shaw's biography, Belafonte, the singer explained: "On both sides of my family, my aunts and uncles intermarried. If you could see my whole family congregated together, you would see every tonality of color, from the darkest black, like my Uncle Hyne, to the ruddiest white, like my Uncle Eric, a Scotsman." He had one brother, named Dennis. His father was gone often, working for British merchant boats as a chef. When Belafonte was six, his father left his mother for a white woman, which was thought to have added to his own hostility toward whites as a child. At the age of nine, his mother sent him and his brother to her native Kingston, Jamaica, where she thought it would be safer than the restless streets of a poverty-stricken, Depression-era Harlem. There he attended private British boarding schools, where caning for misbehavior was a common practice. As a boy with darker skin, he was not always treated well by his lighter-skinned relatives. Still, he enjoyed the sounds of calypso music, which would influence his later career. In Shaw's biography, Belafonte noted his thoughts about of life in Jamaica: "I still have the impression of an environment that sang. Nature sang and the people sang, too. The streets of Kingston constantly rang with the songs of piping peddlers or politicians drumming up votes in the lilting singsong of the island. I loved it. I loved also night gazing. I used to climb up a mango tree and lie back and munch mangoes and gaze through the leaves at the star-filled sky." When he was 13, Belafonte returned to New York, where he was a star on the track team at George Washington High School. In 1944, he left school to join the Navy. That same year, he met his first wife, Margurite Byrd.

Belafonte married Byrd on June 18, 1948. They had two daughters, Adrienne and Shari. Shari would grow up to be an actress. The troubled marriage eventually ended in divorce. In 1957, Belafonte married Julie Robinson. They had a son, David, and a daughter, Gina. Gina became an actress, as well, starring in the 1980s hit television series, "The Commish."

Belafonte first studied acting at a dramatic workshop affiliated with the New School for Social Research and run by German director, Erwin Piscator. Among his classmates were Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, and Sidney Poitier. Belafonte's recording of "Calypso," with RCA Victor in 1955, was the first recording ever to sell over one million copies. That same year he won a Tony award on Broadway for his performance in a musical revue, "Three for Tonight." Belafonte had completed two movies by that time, Bright Road, in 1953, and Carmen Jones, in 1954. Carmen Jones, was the first movie with an entirely black cast to become a box office success. In a 1972 interview with Guy Flatley of The New York Times, Belafonte discussed his success with the public. "From the beginning, I cut a certain figure on stage, a figure that has come to mean something specific in the minds and hearts of people around the world. I'm the guy in the cutaway shirt and the tight pants, the guy doing all those catchy songs. People have always brought this image of me into the theater with them, and no matter what I've felt internally, they just wouldn't buy a lot of the things I was trying to project."

Whether Belafonte appeared on television, film or live concerts, the American public was unaware of his anger. He received Grammy awards for recordings in 1960, 1961, and 1965. In 1989, he was recognized as a Kennedy Center Honoree, the annual award recognizing careers of distinction in the arts. Some of his films included, Buck and the Preacher, in 1972; Island in the Sun, 1957; White Man's Burden, 1995, and the made-for television movie, Swing Vote, 1999. His complete recording history numbers in the thousands. His soft melodic voice crossed any barriers of racial prejudice, whether or not he approached that subject directly.

After completing work on the light-hearted comedy, "Uptown Saturday Night" in 1972, Belafonte made few films, until he was approached by director Robert Altman in 1996. When Altman asked him to play the role of Seldom Seen in his film, "Kansas City," Belafonte was surprised. It was unlike any role he had ever taken - breaking his stereotype as a happy, easy-going character. "Here I had to play this rather debased, degenerate, complicated, evil man. To have Bob Altman believe that I could do it strongly enough never to let the audience even think of the 'Belafonte' they're familiar with, but just to stick completely to what the character does, was an enormous trust. And an enormous challenge," Belafonte told Henri Behar in a 1999 interview for Film Scouts. By the late 1990s, Belafonte was making his way as a director and producer. His work as executive producer for a television mini-series, Parting the Waters, premiered in 2000. In his interview with Behar, Belafonte discussed his consciousness as a black person in Hollywood, trying to make a difference. "I'm denied to the degree that all black people are denied that. I don't mean me Harry personally. I'm denied it because nobody has done it. Sidney Poitier had a certain level of work, Spike Lee has a certain level of work, Denzel Washington has a certain level of work. I have a certain level of work. But if you take a good look at black life, and its diversity, and how much there is in that life… . There is a life in Brazil, a life in Africa, a life in Paris. There's a very intense black life in Paris and in England. We tell very little of that canvas. It's so small it hardly equates."

Leading the Struggle

Belafonte was constantly visible to anyone with a television set in the 1960s. He was photographed on the pages of Time, and Life, magazines, often arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King and others, as they marched for civil rights in the United States. Belafonte was convinced that nonviolence was the only means to affect change for African Americans. The ongoing struggle to improve the lives of African Americans and blacks throughout the world occupied a great deal of his time and attention. In June 1998, Belafonte was present at Newcastle Upon Tyne University in Northern England when that institution memorialized his friend Martin Luther King, with a permanent plaque. They also honored Belafonte with an honorary doctorate, only the second person in the school's history to be so honored. Dr. King had been the first.

Further Reading

Shaw, Arnold. Belafonte: An Unauthorized Biography, The Chilton Company, 1960.

Ebony, November 1981.

The New York Times, April 7, 1996; June 3, 1998; February 8, 1999.

The New York Times Biographical Edition, July 2, 1972.

Behar, Henri, "A Conversation with Harry Belafonte," Film Scouts, October 9, 1999. Available at: http://www.filmscouts.com.

"Harry Belafonte," (Kennedy Center Honors), AfroPop, 1989.Available at: http://www.afropop.org.

"Harry Belafonte." AFAMNET, 1998. Available at: http://www.afamnet.com.

"Harry Belafonte." EOnline, 1999. Available at: http://www.eonline.com.

singer; actor; activist

Personal Information

Born Harold George Belafonte, Jr., March 1, 1927, in New York, NY; son of Harold George and Melvine (Love) Belafonte; married, 1948; wife's name Marguerite (divorced); married Julie Robinson (a dancer), March 8, 1957; children: Adrienne, Shari, David, Gina. Education: Attended Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, studying under Erwin Piscator.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Navy, 1943-45.

Career

Singer, actor, producer, political activist. Joined the American Negro Theater, late 1940s, appearing in Juno and the Paycock; performed at such clubs as the Royal Roost Nightclub and the Village Vanguard, New York City, late 1940s and early 1950s; appeared on Broadway in John Murray Anderson's Almanac, 1953; appeared in television adaptation of Carmen Jones, 1955; released Calypso, 1956; appeared in films, including Island in the Sun, 1957, Uptown Saturday Night, 1974, First Look, 1984, and The Player, 1992; produced television program A Time for Laughter, 1967; helped organize We Are the World recording session, 1985. Named cultural adviser to the Peace Corps by President John F. Kennedy; named member of the board of directors, Southern Christian Leadership Conference; chair of Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Fund; appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, 1987.

Life's Work

It has been said that in the life and work of entertainer Harry Belafonte, the worlds of music and morality do not collide, but rather balance harmoniously. In the 1950s Belafonte introduced the colorful, bouncy melodies of calypso music to the United States, and American listeners began swaying to the jaunty Caribbean beat and singing "Day-O" along with the masterful crooner. Since that time Belafonte has used his visibility as an entertainer to cast a political spotlight on humanitarian causes ranging from world hunger to civil rights to the plight of children in the Third World. Belafonte's accomplishments, and the awards bestowed on him in the spheres of entertainment and activism, show a man equally committed to musical excellence and political virtuousness.

Known as the "consummate entertainer," Belafonte was born in Harlem, New York, in 1927. His parents were West Indian, and he moved with his mother to her native Jamaica when he was a child. In the five years he spent on the island he not only absorbed the music that was such a vital part of the culture but also observed the effects of colonialism, the political oppression that native Jamaicans had to endure under British rule. "That environment gave me much of my sense of the world at large and what I wanted to do with it," Belafonte was quoted as saying in the Paul Masson Summer Series. "It helped me carve out a tremendous link to other nations that reflect a similar temperament or character."

Once back in Harlem, another culturally and artistically rich environment, Belafonte became street smart, learning the hard lessons of survival in the big city. When the United States entered World War II, he ended his high school education and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After an honorable discharge he returned to New York City, where he bounced between odd jobs. His first foray into the world of entertainment came in the late 1940s when he was given two tickets to a production of the American Negro Theater. He was hooked after one performance. "I was absolutely mesmerized by that experience," he told the Ottawa Citizen in 1990. "It was really a spiritual, mystical feeling I had that night. I went backstage to see if there was anything I could do." His first leading role with the company was in Irish playwright Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Impressed by the power and message of O'Casey's words, and by the promise of theater in general, Belafonte enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, studying under famous German director Erwin Piscator, whose other students included renowned actors Rod Steiger and Beatrice Arthur.

Belafonte was concerned about the scarcity of work for black actors but got a break when, as a class project, he sang an original composition called "Recognition." His audience was spellbound. Among the listeners was the owner of the Royal Roost Nightclub, a well-known Broadway jazz center. Belafonte was offered a two-week stint that, due to such positive reception, blossomed into a twenty-week engagement. At the Roost and later at other clubs, such as the Village Vanguard in New York City's Greenwich Village, Belafonte charmed audiences with his husky-yet-sweet-voiced adaptations of popular and West Indian folk songs.

Armed with a recording contract with Capital Records and the praise of critics, this bright new talent started making his mark. He first appeared on Broadway in John Murray Anderson's Almanac, for which he won a Tony Award. In the 1954 film Carmen Jones, based on French composer Georges Bizet's opera Carmen, Belafonte played the lead role and endeared himself to a national audience. Throughout the next few decades he continued to act in films such as Island in the Sun and Uptown Saturday Night and produced television programs such as A Time for Laughter, in which he introduced U.S. audiences to then nationally unknown humorists Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx.

It was in 1956, with the release of his album Calypso, that Belafonte sealed his status as a superstar and consummated America's love affair with Caribbean music. His most famous recordings, "Banana Boat Song" (popularly known as "Day-O") and "Matilda," recall the melodies, rhythm, and spirit of Jamaica and other West Indian cultures. Throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Belafonte reached into the lore and music of other cultures, most notably those of South America and Africa. He also continued with his celebrated interpretations of American folk ballads and spirituals, but he has always been most closely associated with the zest and spunk of calypso.

Belafonte's Calypso was the first album to sell more than one million copies, a benchmark that led to the establishment of the Grammy Awards. The album was only one of many illustrious firsts in Belafonte's life. He was the first black man to win an Emmy Award as well as the first black to work as a television producer. Belafonte was also the first entertainer--black or white--to be named cultural adviser to the Peace Corps by U.S. president John F. Kennedy.

Belafonte's success on vinyl and tape has always translated well in his live concerts, where he uses sing-alongs, dialogue with audience members, and a contagious energy and excitement to get the crowds responding jubilantly. Dave Hoekstra wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1990 that Belafonte "sings from discovery and fulfillment.... So when you listen to the Belafonte songbook on a perfect summer night, you know the dignity, poise and spiritual exploration will still be heard long after the voice has passed. That is Harry Belafonte's lasting contribution to American popular music."

While his accomplishments in music are considered groundbreaking, Belafonte's political activities on behalf of humanitarian causes around the world are also extremely significant. And more often than not he has been able to successfully merge these two passions. In 1985 Belafonte helped organize the recording session for the philanthropic and inspirational We Are the World, which won a Grammy Award, and he has been involved in many projects aimed at helping those suffering from poverty, homelessness, and famine around the world. As a result of his efforts to fight segregation in the United States, Belafonte was named to the board of directors of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading civil rights organization, and he has been chair of the memorial fund bearing the name of his friend, the late civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1987 he was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and he has been dubbed the "Children's Patron Saint" by Ebony magazine.

As a young boy keenly aware of British domination over the lives of Jamaicans, Belafonte learned a lasting lesson about the power of art in general, and song in particular, to express and shed personal meaning on the physical, psychological, and cultural constraints generated by colonialism. "People living in that sort of oppression are always very creative," he was quoted as saying in the Summer Series magazine. "The environment was terribly musical. People sang while working in the fields, while selling their wares in the streets, in church, during festivals. That background had a great impact on me."

Although he would always believe that music should be a cherished vehicle for commentary on the human condition, Belafonte recognized in the 1960s that song alone, no matter how politically and moralistically charged, would not right the wrongs suffered by society's disenfranchised people. Taking advantage of the fame garnered from his music and theater successes, Belafonte donned the cape of activist and quickly earned the respect of those who might have worried that he was simply an entertainer dabbling self-servingly in politics.

After World War II, in which he was first exposed to what he viewed as an honorable fight waged on moral grounds, Belafonte found political mentors and ideological inspiration in former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and actor and singer Paul Robeson. He saw in Roosevelt an irrepressible dedication to human rights and the courage to take stands with which mainstream America might have disagreed. Robeson, a trailblazing, black entertainer, was an early campaigner against racial segregation and had been blacklisted by the U.S. government for his pro-Communist beliefs. Of Roosevelt and Robeson, Belafonte was quoted as saying in the Ottawa Citizen, "Both taught me by example to be resilient and fight for things I believed in even if it could get me into trouble."

Throughout the 1960s Belafonte's primary ethical focus was on the Jim Crow laws of segregation. He unified cultural elements behind the civil rights marches in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and helped organize the celebrated 1963 Freedom March in Washington, D.C., at which his close friend, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. Years earlier, Belafonte had been forced to stop a South Carolina performance at intermission because of rumors that the Ku Klux Klan was intending a violent demonstration. But in viewing the development of American society and the evolution of the civil rights struggle, Belafonte has come to realize that the racism he and others have long decried is evident throughout society's cultural mosaic and not merely in the Klan's vicious epithets and signature white sheets. "There's a lot of racial tension coming out of our communities," he was quoted as saying in the Summer Series magazine. "There's a tremendous amount of crack and dope in black neighborhoods, which I think is an extension of racial inequalities. Racism has become more insidious, sometimes more clandestine, sometimes more blatant, as in the case of the Skin heads and others who represent the new wave of white, lower-middle-class people who have come together to preach racial violence. It's quite unnerving."

In 1966, Belafonte performed in Paris, France and Stockholm, Sweden in the first European-sponsored benefit concert on behalf of King. As a result of his efforts to fight segregation and racism, he was appointed to the board of directors of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading civil rights organization, served as chairman of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Fund, and was named one of the three executors of the King estate after the celebrated leader was assassinated in 1968.

In recent years, Belafonte has used his celebrity to draw attention to civil rights issues and injustices on a global scale, particularly in respect to children suffering from malnutrition and sickness. In 1985 Belafonte, with friend Ken Kragen, organized the hugely successful and inspirational "We Are the World," which won a Grammy award, and more importantly for Belafonte, raised millions of dollars for and heightened an awareness of victims of famine and drought in Africa. An outgrowth of that record was the USA for Africa foundation, on whose board of directors Belafonte has served with, among others, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, and Kenny Rogers. Belafonte was also deeply involved in "Hands Across America," an outgrowth organization benefiting hungry and homeless Americans.

In 1987 Belafonte was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, only the second American ever to hold the title. His first humanitarian odyssey in that position brought him to Dakar, Senegal, where he served as head of a four-day symposium in which African intellectuals and artists strove to publicize and consider solutions to the variegated problems besetting children on that continent. His commitment to the survival and health of Third World children led Ebony magazine to dub him "The Children's Patron Saint" and a "prime minister of hope," and earned him the 1989 Danny Kaye Award by the U.S. Committee for UNICEF. Vigorously pursuing a UNICEF drive to immunize children in developing counties, Belafonte has been called on frequently to testify before congressional committees. Through a fund bearing his name, Belafonte has opened new cultural exchanges with African nations, enabling African students to pursue an education in the United States.

As an outspoken critic of South Africa's apartheid government, Belafonte orchestrated a burst of artistic, if not political, liberation with the 1988 release of his critically acclaimed album Paradise in Gazankulu. Because of his arrest years earlier during an antiapartheid protest outside the South African Embassy in Washington D.C., his advocacy of strict international economic sanctions, and his repeated calls for the release of then imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, Belafonte was considered a persona non grata--unaccepted or unwelcome--in South Africa and could not go to that country in order to work on the album. Instead, musicians recorded the music there and the tapes were sent to the United States, where Belafonte added the vocals. Though banned on South African radio, Paradise was praised internationally for beautifully capturing in music the painful and haunting stories and poems describing life in a land infamous for its oppression.

In 1989 Belafonte was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the performing arts, arguably the most prestigious award given to artists by the U.S. government. "I couldn't help thinking how much of my life had been spent at odds with these people, with the establishment, and here they were honoring me," he was quoted as telling the Ottawa Citizen. "I've been critical of government actions and I will continue to be critical, and here I was being recognized for my accomplishments. It made me fall in love with America all over again."

Awards

Tony Award for best supporting actor, 1953, for John Murray Anderson's Almanac; Emmy Award, 1960, for Tonight With Harry Belafonte; Grammy Award, 1985, for We Are the World; Danny Kaye Award, U.S. Committee for UNICEF, 1989.

Works

Selective Discography

• Mark Twain, RCA, 1954.
• Calypso (includes "Banana Boat Song"), RCA, 1956.
• Belafonte (includes "Matilda"), RCA, 1956.
• An Evening With Belafonte, RCA, 1957.
• Harry Belafonte Songs of the Caribbean, RCA, 1957.
• Belafonte Sings the Blues, RCA, 1958.
• Love Is a Gentle Thing, RCA, 1959.
• (With Lena Horne) Porgy and Bess, RCA, 1959.
• Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, RCA, 1959.
• My Lord What a Mornin', RCA, 1960.
• Swing Dat Hammer, RCA, 1960.
• Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall, RCA, 1960.
• Jump Up Calypso, RCA, 1961.
• To Wish You a Merry Christmas, RCA, 1962.
• Midnight Special, RCA, 1962.
• The Many Moods of Belafonte, RCA, 1962.
• Streets I Have Walked, RCA, 1963.
• Belafonte at the Greek Theater, RCA, 1964.
• Ballads, Blues, and Boasters, RCA, 1964.
• (With Miriam Makeba) An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba, RCA, 1965.
• (With Nana Mouskouri) An Evening With Belafonte/Mouskouri, RCA, 1966.
• In My Quiet Room, RCA, 1966.
• Calypso in Brass, RCA, 1967.
• Belafonte on Campus, RCA, 1967.
• Belafonte Sings of Love, RCA, 1968.
• Homeward Bound, RCA, 1970.
• Belafonte by Request, RCA, 1970.
• Belafonte Warm Touch, RCA, 1971.
• This Is Belafonte, RCA, 1971.
• Don't Stop the Carnival, RCA, 1972.
• Play Me, RCA, 1973.
• Turn the World Around, Columbia Records, 1977.
• Loving You Is Where I Belong, Columbia Records, 1981 (Europe).
• Paradise in Gazankulu, EMI, 1988.
• Harry Belafonte: All Time Greatest Hits, RCA, 1988, volumes 2 and 3, 1989.
• Belafonte '89, EMI, 1989 (Europe).
• Belafonte '89 (abridged version), EMI, 1990 (United States).
• Pure Gold, RCA.

Further Reading

Books

• Fogelson, Genia, Harry Belafonte, Holloway, 1980.

• Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1990.
• Ebony, September 1988.
• Fun & Gaming, March 1, 1990.
• Ottawa Citizen, January 13, 1990.
• Paul Masson Summer Series, June 1989.
• Sun-Times (Chicago), July 27, 1990.
• Additional information obtained from a 1991 Belafonte Enterprises Inc. biography.

— Isaac Rosen

Quotes:

"You can cage the singer but not the song."