Iconic screen actor and civil rights leader Harry Belafonte has passed at the age of 96, his family has confirmed. Senior Editor James R. Sanders reports
Belafonte, otherwise known as the “King of Calypso” passed on Tuesday of congestive heart failure, per Paula Witt, a representative for the family. The actor and singer made history on screen, but his contributions to the civil rights movement and anti-apartheid movement in Africa were just as monumental.
Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born in Harlem in 1927 to Jamaican parents.
Belafonte rose to fame in the 1950’s after recording, “The Banana Boat Song,” better known as “Day-O.”
In his memoir, he wrote, “I was good as a singer, but I wasn’t the best, and I’d known that from the start,” Belafonte wrote in “My Song.” “I had to rely on my acting. And in the end, I could make a case that I was the greatest actor in the world: I’d convinced everyone I could sing.”
Per USA Today, “In 1954, he won a Tony Award as best supporting or featured actor in a musical for “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac,” becoming the first Black man ever to receive a Tony. He was also the first Black man to receive an Emmy Award, with his first solo TV special “Tonight with Belafonte” in 1960.”
In the 1960’s he was influential in the Civil Rights Movement, leveraging his celebrity to bring about change for the Black community along with Sidney Poitier.
“Knowing I was playing to an influential crowd, I’d (sneak) in a little politics with new lines for old songs, like ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’: ‘Mississippi on your knees, Hallelujah!/ Another bus is on the way, Hallelujah,’ “ he wrote in his memoir.
In the 1980’s he did the same, organizing to end famine in Africa and bring efforts towards acknowledging apartheid and the freeing of Nelson Mandela.
This story is developing.