Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become amajor force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.
At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens, Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a few years no one in music, was bigger.
Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell. ” His album “Calypso” reached the top of the Billboard album chart in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.
He was equally successful as a concert attraction: Handsome and charismatic, he held audiences spellbound with dramatic interpretations of a repertoire that encompassed folk traditions from all over the world — rollicking calypsos like “Matilda,” work songs like “Lead Man Holler,” tender ballads like “Scarlet Ribbons. ” By 1959 he was the most highly paid Black performer in history.
Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though. His primary focus from the late 1950s was civil rights.
Early in his career, he befriended Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a friend but also an ardent supporter of King and the quest for racial equality he personified. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principalfund-raisers for that organisation and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He provided money to bail King and other civil rights activists out of jail. His spacious apartment in Manhattan became King’s home away from home. And he quietly maintained an insurance policy on King’s life, with his family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure the family was taken care of after King was assassinated in 1968.
In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after King’s death, he had said although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. He was much more upset by the racism that he confronted even at the height of his fame.
He sometimes drew criticism from Black people, including the suggestion early in his career that he owed his success to the lightness of his skin. When he divorced his wife in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, The Amsterdam News wrote, “Many Negroes are wondering why a man who has waved the flag of justice for his race should turn from a Negro wife to a white wife. ”
When RCA Victor, his record company, promoted him as the “King of Calypso,” he wasdenounced as a pretender in Trinidad, where an annual competition is held to choose a calypso king. He himself never claimed to be a purist when it came to calypso or any of the other traditional styles. He and his songwriting collaborators loved folk music, he said, but saw nothing wrong with shaping it to their own ends.
Never shy about expressing his opinion, he became increasingly outspoken during the George W Bush administration. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master. ” Four years later he called Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world. ”Such statements made Belafonte a frequent target of criticism, but no one disputed his artistry.
He remained politically active to the end. On Election Day 2016, The Times published an opinion article by Belafonte urging people not to vote for Donald Trump, whom he called “feckless and immature. ” Four years later, he returned to the opinion pages with a similar message: “We have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.
At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens, Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a few years no one in music, was bigger.
Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell. ” His album “Calypso” reached the top of the Billboard album chart in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.
He was equally successful as a concert attraction: Handsome and charismatic, he held audiences spellbound with dramatic interpretations of a repertoire that encompassed folk traditions from all over the world — rollicking calypsos like “Matilda,” work songs like “Lead Man Holler,” tender ballads like “Scarlet Ribbons. ” By 1959 he was the most highly paid Black performer in history.
Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though. His primary focus from the late 1950s was civil rights.
Early in his career, he befriended Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a friend but also an ardent supporter of King and the quest for racial equality he personified. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principalfund-raisers for that organisation and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He provided money to bail King and other civil rights activists out of jail. His spacious apartment in Manhattan became King’s home away from home. And he quietly maintained an insurance policy on King’s life, with his family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure the family was taken care of after King was assassinated in 1968.
In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after King’s death, he had said although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. He was much more upset by the racism that he confronted even at the height of his fame.
He sometimes drew criticism from Black people, including the suggestion early in his career that he owed his success to the lightness of his skin. When he divorced his wife in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, The Amsterdam News wrote, “Many Negroes are wondering why a man who has waved the flag of justice for his race should turn from a Negro wife to a white wife. ”
When RCA Victor, his record company, promoted him as the “King of Calypso,” he wasdenounced as a pretender in Trinidad, where an annual competition is held to choose a calypso king. He himself never claimed to be a purist when it came to calypso or any of the other traditional styles. He and his songwriting collaborators loved folk music, he said, but saw nothing wrong with shaping it to their own ends.
Never shy about expressing his opinion, he became increasingly outspoken during the George W Bush administration. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master. ” Four years later he called Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world. ”Such statements made Belafonte a frequent target of criticism, but no one disputed his artistry.
He remained politically active to the end. On Election Day 2016, The Times published an opinion article by Belafonte urging people not to vote for Donald Trump, whom he called “feckless and immature. ” Four years later, he returned to the opinion pages with a similar message: “We have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.