John Clarke appreciates the life, art and politics and Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte, revered as an actor and singer and greatly respected as a political activist, died on 25 April at the age of 96. As a Black artist who broke through racial barriers in the 1950s and who enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1960s, Belafonte was in a position to support and advance the civil-rights struggles of that period. He continued to challenge racism and to speak out on a range of injustices, both in the US and internationally, for the rest of his life. He remained ‘the model and the epitome of the celebrity activist.’

Belafonte was born in New York City, in 1927, in a West Indian immigrant neighbourhood. His parents were both undocumented, and he would later recall his early experiences of ‘an underground life, as criminals of a sort, on the run.’ The boy suffered a great deal of violence at the hands of his father, and had to spend part of his childhood living with relatives in Jamaica.

Reading was a challenge for Belafonte, who was likely dyslexic, and he dropped out of high school, enlisting in the navy shortly afterwards. In this period, he read Color and Democracy by the Black socialist W.E.B. Du Bois, which he considered the start of his political education.

After leaving the navy at the end of the war, he found a job as a janitor in a residential building. A tenant gave him free tickets for a play at the American Negro Theatre. He was so impressed by this that he volunteered with the theatre and started to take acting roles. He found himself working with Sidney Poitier and, at this time, also met Paul Robeson. The friendship he struck up with Robeson and his first involvement with left-wing causes led to him being visited by the FBI.

Challenging racism

In 1954, Belafonte made his debut as a singer, releasing an album of traditional folk songs. His second and third albums, however, brought him fame and success. His rendition of Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), topped the charts internationally. He would release thirty studio albums during his career and be given two Grammy awards. Bob Dylan, who debuted on one of Belafonte’s albums, observed that ‘Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it.’

Alongside his soaring role as a singer, Belafonte acted in a number of films. Most notably, he had a lead role in Island in the Sun, alongside James Mason, Joan Fontaine and Joan Collins. However, when he was offered a role in the film Porgy and Bess, he turned it down on the grounds that it was ‘racially demeaning’.

Belafonte revealed in an interview years later that he also turned down the lead roles in the movies To Sir, with Love and Lilies of the Field that would be taken up by Sidney Poitier. In the case of both of these films, he felt that the portrayal of Black people was offensive and told his interviewer quite simply that: ‘No, I don’t want to play pictures like that.’

In 1968, Belafonte played the role of fill-in host for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. He interviewed Martin Luther King who stated that the ‘time has come to bring to bear the power of the nonviolent direct-action movement on the basic economic conditions that we face all over the country.’ As King explained the impacts of poverty on working-class people across the US, Belafonte interjected: ‘Then someone is lying to the American people.’

During the same year, Belafonte performed an anti-war song on an NBC special with the white British singer, Petula Clark. During this, she spontaneously touched his arm. An advertising manager for the sponsor of the show, Chrysler-Plymouth, objected and a retake was demanded. However, both of the performers refused to comply with this racist code of conduct. When Belafonte received a telephone call from an NBC official offering an apology, he responded: ‘Your apology comes 100 years too late.’

By the early 1960s, Belafonte had decided to make the civil-rights struggle his major priority. ‘I realized that the movement was more important than anything else,’ he wrote in his 2011 memoir My Song. John F. Kennedy, anxious to win over Black voters, visited Belafonte and a meeting with King was arranged. However, he remained sharply critical of the Kennedys and their links to segregationist Democrats in the South. He deplored their ‘failure to protect the “Freedom Riders” trying to integrate bus stations.’

Belafonte played a major role in fundraising and building support for the historic March on Washington. In 1964, after three Freedom Summer volunteers were murdered in Mississippi, Belafonte and Poitier ‘personally delivered tens of thousands of dollars to activists’. At one point, the two of them were chased by car by members of the KKK. After the first civil-rights march in Selma faced a brutal police attack, Belafonte made sure that an array of famous performers were on hand to play for those participating in the second march.

After the murder of King in 1968, Belafonte turned some of his attention to international issues, paying particularly close attention to the struggle in South Africa. He was active in the fight to impose economic sanctions on the Apartheid regime and campaigned for the release of Nelson Mandela. When this was achieved, he helped coordinate Mandela’s first visit to the US, after his release in 1990.

In the 1970s, Belafonte returned to acting in films, co-starring with Poitier in Buck and the Preacher, and starring in the popular comedy Uptown Saturday Night. He appeared in a series of other films, and was one of those interviewed for When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s documentary about Hurricane Katrina. In 2011, HBO made a documentary about his life entitled Sing Your Song.

Activist and artist

The conditions that shaped Belafonte’s upbringing and the injustices he couldn’t ignore, even when he had obtained success as a performer, ensured that he ‘did not think of himself as an artist who became an activist, but an activist who happened to be an artist’. He recalled that his mother had told him when he was a boy that: ‘When you grow up, son, never go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could have done during the day to strike a blow against injustice and you didn’t do it.’

In 1997, Belafonte was invited to address a gathering of US veterans of the Spanish Civil War in New York City. He told the audience that: ‘It is interesting to me that I should have been blessed in those early years of decision-making by having been embraced by a man who had a profound effect on my life … Paul Robeson.’ He told the gathering that ‘it was from Paul that I learned that the purpose of art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be. And that if art were put into the service of the human family, it could only enhance their betterment.’

Doubtless, political limitations and personal contradictions may be found in the life of Harry Belafonte but, coming from a background of hardship and poverty so integrally linked to the deep racism in US society, he achieved success and fame as an artist. This, in itself, represented a challenge to a system that blocked the way for Black people. However, he chose not to ignore the injustices that so many others faced, and to speak out and support the vital struggles unfolding around him. His great talents and the ‘celebrity status’ he had achieved provided him the opportunity to make a difference in important ways.

In a country where racism has been shaped so rigidly by the bitter legacy of chattel slavery, Harry Belafonte will be remembered as a Black person who broke through the barriers but who also struggled to bring them down. It seems fitting to close with something he said in an interview with the New York Times in 2001: ‘I’ve got to be a part of whatever the rebellion is that tries to change all this. The anger is a necessary fuel. Rebellion is healthy.’