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harry belafonte
What I Learned About Justice From My First Boss Out of College, Harry Belafonte
Mr. B. set an example by staying true to his convictions, building community and bridges across cultures, and remaining tenacious while battling economic and racial inequality.
May 04, 2023
Some know the late Harry Belafonte for his genre-jumping music and silky baritone voice, epitomized in his classic 1956 album Calypso. Others swoon over his performances in films like the 1954 musical Carmen Jones.
In activist circles, he’s revered for supporting his good friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement, funding voter registration drives in Mississippi, and financing the Freedom Riders and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), among many other examples.
I knew him for something else besides: He was my first boss after college.
In 2005, I worked for Harry Belafonte as his executive assistant in New York. We connected through my mentor-professor Saul Landau, the late writer and filmmaker who befriended “Mr. B” (as he liked to be called) through their travels to Cuba.
I was just beginning my career, knowing only that I was drawn to social justice and the arts. There was no better person to learn about either than from Mr. B — and in no better place than where he once strategized with Dr. King and others in the civil rights movement.
From the moment I started, I took calls and messages for Mr. B not just from those in the music and film industry, but also lawyers, policy advocates, social movement leaders, and poets engaged in ongoing struggles against injustice.
They sought his advice and endorsement, while he focused on empowering the next generation of artists and activists. Even as countless shiny awards lined his office walls, he never rested on his laurels. I saw his humanity — and he challenged my notions of “celebrity.”
Time and again, Mr. B showed that an artist can be more than an entertainer.
During one of my first days on the job, for instance, I dreaded informing him that his friend of 60 years, iconic actor and activist Ossie Davis, had passed away. Very few of us are expected to issue immediate comments to the press after receiving devastating news. Yet amidst his sadness, I remember Mr. B’s strength as he spoke in honor of his friend to the media throughout that long day.
As I now look back at his early life, I have an even greater appreciation for what he overcame. Born to Jamaican immigrants in Harlem in 1927, Mr. B’s early years were heavily influenced by poverty.
In his 2011 memoir, My Song, he chronicled his mother struggling to put food on the table as a domestic worker. His father was a cook aboard United Fruit Company ships and wasn’t always present. Belafonte’s 1956 song “Day-O (Banana Boat Song)” pays tribute to both the toils of his parents and the workers in the banana fields of Jamaica.
After serving in the Navy, Belafonte worked odd jobs to make ends meet in a country still ruled by segregation. His mother’s refrain to fight injustice wherever he saw it laid the foundation for his life and career trajectory. Because of her, he recalled in his memoir, he was an “activist who’d become an artist.”
Against all odds Belafonte rose to stardom, becoming the first Black man to win a Tony, the first Black man to win an Emmy, and the first artist to record an album that sold 1 million copies. And time and again, Mr. B showed that an artist can be more than an entertainer.
He supported the movement against apartheid in South Africa and the campaign to free Nelson Mandela. He organized the all-star charity record “We Are the World” that raised millions for famine relief in Africa. He served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for 36 years, advocating for health care, HIV/AIDS treatment, and free education access for all.
I will always treasure the lessons I learned from Mr. B. He set an example by staying true to his convictions, building community and bridges across cultures, and remaining tenacious while battling economic and racial inequality.
Rest in power, Mr. B. The work continues, guided by your life’s inspiring song.
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Harry Belafonte Never Stopped Fighting for Justice, and Neither Should We
The famous singer used his celebrity to support causes from civil rights to anti-colonialist and anti-war movements and Black Lives Matter.
Apr 29, 2023
On a freezing cold day, February 15th, 2003, Harry Belafonte, the legendary singer, actor, and activist strode onto a stage outside the United Nations in New York City. Rallies against the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq were taking place around the globe that day, in what is believed to be the largest mass protest in human history. Belafonte then did what he had been doing for over half a century–he spoke truth to power:
"We stand for peace. We stand for the truth of what is at the heart of the American people."
Harry Belafonte died this week at the age of 96. Throughout his life, he fought for justice, using his celebrity to support causes from civil rights to anti-colonialist and anti-war movements and Black Lives Matter.
Harry Belafonte never relented. He intensified his fight against South African apartheid and the ravages of U.S. imperialism abroad. He challenged those in power regardless of political party, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
Belafonte continued in that 2003 speech, delivered to several hundred thousand anti-war marchers in New York:
"We were misled by those who created the falseness of the Bay of Tonkin, which falsely led us into a war with Vietnam, a war that we could not and did not win. We lied to the American people about Grenada…about Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, and many places in the world. We stand here today to let those people know that America is a vast and diverse country, and we are part of the greater truth of what makes our nation. Dr. King once said that if mankind does not put an end to war, war will put an end to mankind."
Harry Belafonte was one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s closest advisors and confidants. He first met King in 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. Their initial meeting, slated for 20 minutes, lasted four hours.
"At the end of that meeting, I knew that I would be in his service and focus on the cause of the desegregation movement, the right to vote, and all that he stood for," Belafonte said at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, on the Democracy Now! news hour. "Although we understood how perilous the journey would be, we were not quite prepared for all that we had to confront. I think that it was the most important time in my life."
Thus began a historic friendship that shaped the struggle for desegregation and racial equality. Belafonte knew King like few others. He was loyal to him until the end, when many had abandoned King as his agenda broadened to include fierce opposition to the Vietnam War.
In his memoir, My Song, Belafonte recounts a conversation with King one week before his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. King was organizing The Poor People's Campaign, to link and overcome the three evils he saw in our society: racism, militarism, and materialism. As King described the campaign's strategy, he was challenged by Andrew Young, an advisor who would later become the Mayor of Atlanta and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Belafonte recounted King's reply:
"'The trouble,' Martin went on, 'is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level…That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we're going to have to change the system.'"
Dr. King frequently spoke out against capitalism, but this private moment shared by Belafonte shows the depth of his critique. "At heart, Martin was a socialist and a revolutionary thinker," Belafonte wrote. One week later, King was dead, shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Harry Belafonte never relented. He intensified his fight against South African apartheid and the ravages of U.S. imperialism abroad. He challenged those in power regardless of political party, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
In 2006, as President George W. Bush's disastrous war in Iraq was still raging, Belafonte traveled to Venezuela and spoke at a mass rally, standing alongside President Hugo Chavez:
"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush, says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people—millions—support your revolution, support your ideas, and, yes, expressing our solidarity with you."
Not long after, Belafonte was disinvited from speaking at the funeral of his dear friend, Coretta Scott King, as President Bush was going to attend.
Belafonte often told the story of his mentor, the singer and activist Paul Robeson, who told him, "Get them to sing your song and they will want to know you." As Harry Belafonte is laid to rest, his message still sings out: We cannot rest.
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See We One Another Clearly, Turn the World Around
Apr 28, 2023
We mourn the loss of legendary musician, dauntless activist and "lionhearted civil rights icon" Harry Belafonte, who for seven decades used his celestial voice and righteous rage to "lift people up," wielding his fame, fortune and connections to fund bedrock civil rights efforts from SNCC and the Freedom Riders to babysitters for MLK's kids. Giving us "a piece of his fire," he kept doggedly at it so he could tell his children, "In my lifetime, I did all that I could."
Born in Harlem in 1927 to West Indian immigrants, with a Dutch Jewish paternal grandfather, Belafonte was a cross-cultural visionary equally beloved by black and white audiences, an "agent of change" who became what scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. called "the musical voice of civil rights." Having come of age splitting his childhood between Jim Crow America and a segregated Jamaica still under British rule, he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II only to return to the racist inequities and indignities of both places. When he turned to music, he quickly rose to stardom with the 1956 album Calypso, featuring enduring hits like "Day-O" and "Jamaica Farewell." It sold over a million copies - which briefly rivaled Elvis Presley on the charts - and became, for those of us growing up then, the soundtrack of our young lives. But from the beginning, his music - with its "astonishing" range" - was also consistently, often clandestinely political, melding the buoyant, intricate rhythms of Calypso with stories of hard times. "Almost all Black music is deeply rooted in metaphor," he once said. "The only way we could speak to the pain and the anguish of our experiences was often (by codifying) our stories in the songs we sang." For all its jauntiness, he noted much later, "Dayo is a work song. It's about men who sweat all day long, and they are underpaid... When people sing in delight and dance and love it, they don't really understand it's a song of rebellion."
The same spirit of struggle imbues "Jamaica Farewell," his mournful lament by migrant workers. His slavery-themed "Cotton Fields,” chilling “Swing Dat Hammer” chain gang songs with Odetta, Jewish “Hava Nagila” anthem of freedom, traditional African songs recorded alongside anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba - they're all about loss, grief, hardship, resilience. The title song of his bluesy 1962 “The Midnight Special” was popularized by Leadbelly in the '30s after his release from a Texas prison; it's about a real-life train inmates could hear going past that symbolized their hope for freedom. Belafonte's version also boasts an historic debut: When he couldn't get Sonny Terry, he was told about a young harmonica player named Bob Dylan who "does that whole Sonny thing...he sleeps and dreams it." When he reluctantly sent for him, "this skinny kid" appeared with a paper sack full of harmonicas from Woolworth's: "I played the song for him, he pulled one out of the bag, dipped it in water and played it through a single take, and it was great." Dylan didn't want to do another take and threw the harp into the trash can on his way out; they were so cheap and he was so good, he'd play them once and "they were finished." Decades later, Dylan wrote in a memoir, "Harry had ideals and made you feel you're part of the human race...He never took the easy path, though he could have."
Others' praise echoes him. Coretta Scott King: "Harry motivated Martin, because here’s a man who didn’t have to get involved and who did." Miriam Makeba: "He took all our struggles and made them his own." Julian Bond: "Harry did this over and over and over again." Vulture's Craig Jenkins: "He took the prickly, insistent path... He brought people together while making anyone who was too at ease in the old ways of thinking a little uncomfortable." Attuned to the sorrows of the world, Belafonte often tailored songs to a struggle of the moment; a favorite was "Don't Stop the Carnival," a defiant Trinidadian demand that the carnival go on despite longtime state repression. In his electrifying Global Carnival before exultant crowds in Zimbabwe in 1988, the song became a pan-African anthem of solidarity - "You cannot hold back the tide" - with references to Biko, Tutu, Palestine, Mandela. Performing it 20 years earlier in the U.S. on CBS’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the song became a bitter critique of the just-ended "American bacchanal" that was the violent assault on anti-war protesters at Chicago's Democratic National Convention. As he sang, video of it played behind him: "Tell the whole population/We're having a confrontation/Let it be known/Freedom's gone and the country is not our own/Lord, don't stop the carnival! Carnival's an American bacchanal!"
His fierce devotion to social justice also played out in carefully chosen theater, movie and television roles where he stubbornly refused to just shut up and sing/act. He became the first Black man to win a Tony after composing and starring in his 1954 Broadway debut John Murray Anderson's Almanac; that year he also dazzled in Otto Preminger's all-black Carmen Jones opposite Dorothy Dandridge. But he turned down the director's film adaptation of Porgy and Bess because he felt its themes of sex, addiction and violence perpetuated negative Black stereotypes. On the flip side, as a prominent Black man he refused parts that seemed to him "neutered" of sex and rage, which for him "marked an interior life." He turned down two roles - Lilies of the Field (1963) and To Sir, With Love (1967) - that made a star of his friend Sidney Poitier; as broke young men in New York, the pair used to split the cost of single tickets to Broadway shows so each could watch one act. "To Hollywood, Sidney was the one black actor with whom white America felt comfortable," he wrote, citing Poitier's "sexless gallantry.” “It really burned me that in the midst of the civil rights movement, with Jim Crow laws falling away, the only black who sold movie tickets was one who posed no threat whatsoever to the masculinity of white moviegoers.”
On TV, he became the first Black actor to win an Emmy for the 1959 special “Tonight with Belafonte,” after which he signed a million-dollar deal for a series. That first episode had black and white performers singing and dancing; when producers demanded that, going forward, he had to choose either a black or white cast to avoid race-mixing, he walked out on the deal - “I cannot be re-segregated" - though decades later he admitted he'd still made $800,000, much of which went to civil rights efforts. Both he and Petula Clark also refused to do another take of a song after she touched his arm; such were the times. Belafonte called himself “an activist who became an artist, not an artist who became an activist"; he rejected the notion of movies and TV as "all-powerful arbiters of the culture.” “They just reflected the culture," he wrote in a 2011 autobiography. "Doing battle with them was like fighting a mirror. To change the culture, you had to change the country. And only one thing would change the country: the movement.” In this, he chose two American giants as moral mentors. Paul Robeson, the great baritone, Socialist and blacklisted civil rights activist, gave him his "backbone," he said, and his dear friend Martin Luther King Jr. "nourished" his soul. "As long as the compass was pointed at him, he did not shy away from taking on the challenge,” he said of King. “And our task was to help him succeed."
Following his fervent belief in "whatever you’re capable of doing as artists to help propagandize the civil rights revolution," he used his fame and fortune to nudge Hollywood peers into activism and work "fundraising miracles" for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and its kindred efforts. As a liaison with the bourgeoning civil rights movement, he used friendships with A-listers like Frank Sinatra, Rita Moreno, Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando to raise over $100,000 to fund the 1964 Freedom Rides, to attend 1963's March on Washington - he spoke alongside King - to walk, arms locked, for the third time across Edmund Pettus Bridge. His money "went for bonds and bail...for guys to get in their car and go wherever,” he later said. "I was Daddy Warbucks." During 1964's Freedom Summer, he and Poitier narrowly escaped a Ku Klux Klan ambush after they flew to Mississippi to deliver $70,000 to the newly birthed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Poitier later joked, “Don’t ever call me again." Belafonte loved King as a brother and long supported his family despite later differences; in one haunting photo at King's funeral, he sits anguished and red-eyed beside a stony Coretta Scott King. Much later he wrote a pained song for him - "Armed with love/ he marched us all to war/ The song I sing/ I sing for you sweet Martin Luther King - but rarely performed it.
For one unprecedented week in February 1968, at the height of the Tet offensive and riots in U.S. cities - and just months before King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated - Belafonte took over The Tonight Show to "introduce white America to his world of art and activism...It was like seeing a luminous parallel America where everything seemed possible, even if it wasn't in the end." The first Black host of a late-night show, he welcomed gifted, often Black friends: Lena Horne, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dionne Warwick, the Smothers Brothers. Paul Newman played trombone. Poet Marianne Moore spoke. Zero Mostel stood on a couch to greet Wilt Chamberlain. Sadly, what survives are only his gentle, probing interviews with a relaxed King and Kennedy, weary, thoughtful, despairing about our unholy disparities. He spoke searingly of poverty, rats, lousy housing, hungry children, our "untruths about ourselves (and) treating everyone equally...The fact is we're not caring for them. We're not." Due in part, Belafonte persistently adds, to the war, "this beleaguered child of several administrations." The show, with its palpable sense of loss, is documented in a 2020 film "The Sit-In." Belafonte ended with grace and clarity, recognizing those "offended by the politics aired" but explaining he sought to "give you all a taste of what’s being said in rooms many of you may not know or enter. Thank you for listening.” Whoopi Goldberg: "He was saying, 'We're Americans, we're part of this, we're not going anywhere. Y'all brought us, and we're here.'"
Over time, the silky, multi-platinum voice deepened into a stately, still-rich rasp. He remained knockdown handsome, eloquent and insightful, fiercely devoted to the cause. Tireless, he performed with his terrific musicians and back-up singers around the world - Italy, Angola, Germany, Mozambique - strutting, dancing, drumming, barely breaking a sweat. Watching hours of his performances, we never saw him stop for a break or sip of water, but in an enduring spirit of collectivity he always playfully urged his audiences to sing along with old favorites, which they did, happily. Into his 80s and 90s, he also abided as "an immovable presence on the protest front lines" because, he explained decades ago, “I would hate for my children to look at me and say, ‘Where were you during the moment of the great decision?’” "Movements don't die," he liked to say, "because struggle doesn't die." His perspective was global: Along with his fiery opposition to the Vietnam War, he stood against the U.S. embargo against Cuba, America's wars in the Middle East, South Africa's apartheid system and the 27-year imprisonment of Nelson Mandela; after Mandela's unconditional, bittersweet release in 1990, Belafonte hosted his triumphant visit to the U.S. During the Iraq War, Belafonte called George Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world"; referencing Malcolm X, he also called Colin Powell, who dutifully served Bush, "a house slave."
In the last couple of decades, he worried, "What has happened to the young? What was all of that for - my friends who were murdered?" He went to find out, learning, "There is always something in motion." He turned out for Occupy and BLM events, marched in Pride Parades, sat in with Dream Defenders, joined protests against police murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray et al. He campaigned for Bernie Sanders and served as a co-chair for the Women’s March on D.C., insisting, "I'm just the plumber - I come in to fix the pipes." At 91, he made a cameo appearance in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman with a harrowing speech about America's racism; Lee was awed by "the courage, the weight, the levity... Mr. B is a walking, talking human piece of history." His rare performances were only for a good cause. In 1985, he got the idea for "We Are the World," a charity single by USA for Africa's 46 musical superstars to raise money for a famine in Ethiopia; in days it sold 800,000 copies - ultimately over 20 million - and raised $63 million in famine relief. To lift spirits during a 12-hour session, Al Jarreau broke into an impromptu "Day-O"; in lovely video, we see and hear others quickly, delightedly join in: "Daylight come and we wanna go home." Pointedly stationed in the back, Belafonte at first looks sheepish. But as the voices rise he begins to smile broadly and then sing along, "content to be part of a higher cause without being the shiniest star in the room."
When Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets and Sesame Street, died unexpectedly in 1990, a moving yet often hilarious memorial drew a massive crowd of mourners seeking to pay tribute to a man "balanced effortlessly and gracefully between the sacred and the silly.” Somber in a dark suit, Belafonte spoke poignantly about Henson - "Greater than his artistry was his humanity" - who like him had often "moved among the wretched of the earth." He described mothers in Africa holding children who faced a lifetime of hardships, seeing them laugh at Sesame Street or The Muppets: "They learned to love in an often loveless place...to see there is hope, there is joy, there is greatness in difference. That was Jim's gift." Then he began to sing Turn the World Around, a traditional song he learned from a storyteller in Guinea that he performed on a 1979 Muppets episode. It's about the fire, the sun, the water that work together to turn the world around; humans must also come together, see each other, help each other do the same. "We are of the spirit/Truly of the spirit/Only can the spirit/Turn the world around," he sang. "Do you know who I am?/ Do I know who you are?/See we one another clearly/Turn the world around," punctuated with a soaring, "Woah oh! So is life, so is life!" Belafonte died Tuesday at 96. A standard-bearer of uncommon heart, love, intellect, steadfastness, he "met the moment throughout his life." What a loss. May his memory be for a blessing.
SBCH - Harry Belafonte: Don't Stop The Carnivalyoutu.be
Harry Belafonte and The Muppets - Earth Song (short version)www.youtube.com
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