Belafonte, Harry

BELAFONTE, HARRY (1927-2023). Harry Belafonte’s creative work and public provocations demonstrated his lifelong willingness to stand at the dangerous crossroads where art and politics meet. His musical repertoire celebrated the strengths of working people, Black and white, around the world. He used performance as a means to convey the richness of Black arts and culture while still challenging the whole concept of “the color line” as a tool of the white supremacy, embedded in economic, social and political structures. As the first Black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film, he prioritized the foundational contributions of Black culture, rejected race-based confinement, and celebrated internationalism.

Belafonte saw the arts -- especially music -- as a means to circulate dissenting social visions to a broad popular audience. As a very young performer in the early 1950s, he boldly sang folk music at the moment when many of its more established performers faced anti-communist blacklisting. A recording and film star by 1956, he contributed his celebrity capital, media access, and personal resources to support the new direct action phase of the Black freedom struggle in the United States and anticolonial challenges around the world These commitments persisted throughout his life.

Born in 1927, the son of poor undocumented Jamaican immigrant parents, Belafonte grew up within the Harlem West Indian community. He also visited for extended periods in Jamaica before returning to New York in 1940. His time in Jamaica exposed him to painful colonial stratification and rich musical hybridity. In New York, his hardworking domestic-servant mother took him with her when she attended meetings of exiled Marcus Garvey’s followers and urged him to strike whatever blows he could against injustice; later he conjectured that it was “just poverty, not Karl Marx” that radicalized him. In the Navy in 1944 at age seventeen, he met college-educated Black sailors who introduced him to the writings of W.E. B. Du Bois and to strategic debates on challenging Jim Crow.

Belafonte returned to New York late in 1945, outraged by injustice he witnessed in the segregated military and by the rising conservative backlash against wartime civil rights and labor protection. He found his way to New York’s Black left-wing theater world and discovered a vocation in acting as well as camaraderie in the American Negro Theater. There he met Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier and first encountered Paul Robeson, who came backstage to congratulate the actors, including Belafonte, performing in Communist Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Though he lacked a high school diploma, Belafonte was able to use his GI benefits to enroll in the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, a magnet for actors who wanted to learn the innovative techniques of 1930s radical theater. Robeson introduced Belafonte to New York’s left-wing arts and cultural activism.

The city’s Popular Front organizations prioritized the dismantling of white supremacy as central to progressive social change and supported labor organizing, anti-fascism, and decolonization. Both Du Bois and Robeson were associated with the Council on African Affairs, linking the struggles of African Americans, the movements for Indian independence, Nigerian trade unions, and apartheid in South Africa. Rallies mobilizing for these causes featured Robeson and other figures from the arts -- Broadway actors, jazz musicians, Black and white folksingers --enlivening political speeches with performances. People’s Songs events, initiated by Pete Seeger and friends, featured multiple musical traditions supporting labor organizing and protesting racial inequality. Musical activism by Black and white folk singers, including several Calypsonians, infused Henry Wallace’s third party campaign and provided early performing opportunities for the twenty-one year old Belafonte. Even after Wallace’s electoral defeat progressive organizing and associated musical performances inspired Belafonte’s imagination.

In 1949 Belafonte found paid work on stage, not as an actor but as a jazz musician. Soon he publicly aligned with the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), the successor to cultural committees of the National Negro Congress and the Wallace third party movement, and loosely supported by and associated with the New York area Communist Party. CNA campaigns 1949-1952 demanded new forms of representation of Black culture, full inclusion of Black artists in live and broadcast performances, and increased Black employment in the culture industries-- theater, radio, television, and publishing. Long after anti-Communist pressures forced the CNA to disband, and throughout his life, Belafonte reiterated these demands. Performing at left-wing benefits allowed Belafonte to expand his repertoire beyond the jazz standards he was commonly paid to sing. In CNA he met other New York-based Black radical artists and admirers of Robeson--writers Langston Hughes, John O. Killens, William Attaway, artist Charles White, and actor/director Frank Silvera. Sharing insights from political experience extending back to the 1930s, they became mentors and friends to the young performer.

By the early 1950s, intensifying anti-communist red-baiting forced Robeson and other Black artists off the stage. Robeson generously counseled Belafonte how to preserve his options by speaking politically through his performance. Belafonte’s chosen repertoire of folk songs, work songs, and Calypsos emphasized the creativity of Black and white working people around the world. The increasing commercial popularity of folk song versions by popular vocalists provided additional cover. Belafonte’s heightened visibility and success energized his right-wing critics, and FBI surveillance continued, but by 1956, he was a bona fide movie star. His third album, Calypso, became the first album by any solo performer to sell a million copies.

A consequential 1956 meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr. moved Belafonte to offer his political perspective and star power to the new grassroots nonviolent direct action struggles to end white supremacy. He joined strategy sessions with King, helped negotiations between King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the young protesters in the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC), and raised significant funds to sustain both organizations. King and Belafonte met in late March, 1968 to plan King’s trip to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers and the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign. The tragedy of King’s assassination just days later ended this enormously meaningful partnership.

Beginning in 1956, Belafonte introduced himself as a “world citizen.” He joined campaigns against nuclear testing and publicly supported emerging African independence movements and anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa. Traveling to Africa beginning in the 1960s, he aimed to encourage musical and film collaborations between Africans and African-Americans. When Belafonte shared the stage with exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba, their performance concretized these links. In 1965, Belafonte and Makeba organized performing artists to refuse to perform in South Africa, a cultural boycott that Belafonte and Arthur Ashe expanded into Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid in 1978. A co-founder of TransAfrica, an African American foreign policy lobbying group focused on Africa and the Caribbean, Belafonte was arrested in 1985 picketing at the South African embassy in Washington, DC.

Belafonte used his celebrity status to voice sharp political critique of US foreign policy. He first announced his opposition to US military intervention in Vietnam in 1965 and, beginning in 2002, vehemently challenged the Iraq War, characterizing President George W. Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world.” He sought engagement with independent socialist leaders around the world. In the 1970s he organized support for Michael Manley’s social democratic government in Jamaica. In 1979, he began to travel frequently to post-revolutionary Cuba, meeting with Fidel Castro (and in 1999 advocating for Cuban hip hop artists). Belafonte helped arrange Nelson Mandela’s post-prison tour. In 2006, he traveled with Danny Glover and Dolores Huerta to meet with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Into his eighties and nineties, Belafonte continued to offer radical commentary on racial representation in film and music and electoral politics. He emphasized the special responsibilities of Black political leaders as well as Black artists to use their “celebrity power” to resist social and political inequities. He supported the 2011 encampment at Occupy Wall Street. In 2013 he joined the Dream Defenders’s sit-in at the Florida state capitol protesting the state’s “stand your ground” law and the acquittal of Treyvon Martin’s murderer. He took his place alongside Edie Windsor as grand marshal of the New York City LGBT Pride March. In 2005 he brought together his peers from the civil rights movement to join with youth leaders from across the country in the Gathering for Justice, aiming to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline by focusing on juvenile justice, gun violence, gender equity and transformative politics. In 2013 he founded Sankofa.org in order to encourage younger performing artists to use their creative gifts to support political action and to work with grass roots organizing to oppose systemic racism and violence, income disparity, and inequalities in the justice system. As he aged, he continued to remind people that “there is always something in motion…people out there making a difference.” Belafonte called for the unleashing of “radical thought” and was determined that, until his last breath, “I’ve got to be part of whatever the rebellion is that tries to change all this.”

Belafonte, Harry. My Song. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Eldridge Michael, “Remains of the Day-O: A Conversation with Harry Belafonte” Transition 92 (2002), pp. 110-37.

Leland, John. “The Way We Live Now: 8-26-01: Questions for Harry Belafonte: Sing Out Strong” New York Times (August 26,2001), sec. 6, p. 17.

Roth, Cambria. “Harry Belafonte on Activism, Unrest, and the Importance of Making People Squirm” Crosscut, (October 8, 2015).

Judith E. Smith. Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.

“This Week in History: Singer/Activist Harry Belafonte Thriving at 90,” People’s World, 2/28/2017.