“AN ACTIVIST BEFORE HE WAS AN ARTIST”
Harry Belafonte (HB) died in April at age 96 after a long and prolific career as an artist and an activist. I knew that he had been involved in the human rights movement, but I had no idea how deeply he had been involved nor how long he had been involved – he was active right up until he died. He broke into my consciousness in 1956 when I was 10 – not as an activist, but as an artist. His “Banana Boat Song” with its “Day-o, Day-o/Daylight come an’ me wan’ go home” burst on the American consciousness, and for a while he battled Elvis to be the #1 artist in the country. His album “Calypso” became the first one in history to sell over a million copies. From this point on he was a giant on the American artist scene. If you have not read his remarkable memoir, “My Song,” published in 2011, go find it in your library.
Harry Belafonte was born in poverty in Harlem in 1927 to illegal immigrant parents from Jamaica, who had moved to NYC. Harry’s father left the family before he was born, and Belafonte was raised by his single mom Melvine Love. They went back and forth to Jamaica where Harry spent much of his childhood with relatives. He went to high school in New York but dropped out to join the Navy in 1944 in the middle of WW II. In his segregated barracks, his mates began to share with him pamphlets written by WEB Dubois, and he became hooked on the human rights movement. His mother, however, had planted the seed long before this when she told him as a boy: “When you grow up, son, never ever 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.”
When his Navy term was up, he chose not to re-enlist, and went home to live with his mother and work as a janitor. He was afraid that he would be stuck there for the rest of his life, but there was intervention coming. He did a favor for one of the tenants, and as a tip, she gave him tickets to a play at the American Negro Theater (ANT). He had never been to a professional play before, and he was mesmerized and transformed by it. He put it like this: “When the curtain rose and the actors appeared….they radiated a power that felt spiritual to me. The play, titled “Home is the Hunter,” by Samuel Kootz, was freshly written, about Black servicemen trying to establish postwar lives in Harlem. I knew these characters…..This was a whole new world – an exhilarating world.”
It changed Belafonte’s life – he began to volunteer at the ANT, and he met Sidney Poitier there. The leaders noticed his magnetism and presence, and he began to act in plays. On one such occasion, Paul Robeson came to see the play, and afterwards, Robeson came backstage to praise the cast, and he and Belafonte met. It began a lifelong friendship between them, and Robeson had a huge effect on Harry Belafonte: “Paul Robeson had been my first great formative influence; you might say that he gave me my backbone. Martin Luther King was the second. He nourished my soul.”
Belafonte’s artistic career had begun, and he went back and forth between singing and acting, but eventually he became a star and made a comfortable living. He never forgot his roots, however, and he never forgot the call to justice, instilled by his mother at an early age. All during his early career in show business, he worked for human rights, supporting the labor union movement, refusing to perform in the segregated South, constantly raising money to support many human rights causes. In the spring of 1956, in the early months of the Montgomery bus boycott, Belafonte received a call from someone who said: “You don’t know me, Mr. Belafonte, but my name is Martin Luther King, Jr. “ Belafonte replied: Oh, I know you – everybody knows you.”
King asked to meet him at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where King would be preaching soon. They met and began another lifelong friendship. He supplemented MLK’s salary during the civil rights years. The reconciliation meeting between King’s SCLC and SNCC in 1962 took place in Harry Belafonte’s apartment in New York. Belafonte took out a life insurance policy on MLK, with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary. Belafonte helped to fund the Montgomery Improvement Association, SCLC, SNCC, and the Freedom Riders. He provided the entertainment for the Selma March. MLK would write his famous anti-Vietnam speech in Belafonte’s apartment in New York. Belafonte would also assist Coretta in picking out the suit for MLK to be buried in after King’s assassination.
Like many others in the human rights movement, Belafonte received his share of threats and harassment. One such threat came in Baltimore, when he found a Maryland state trooper standing in his dressing room, glowering at him. The trooper was there to provide security for Belafonte, but he seemed like a menacing presence to HB. When HB got back to his hotel room, he found an envelope with these words: “Dear Mr. Belafonte, I give you these six bullets because they will never be used. None of them will take a human life, because my experience listening to you and Dr. King made me realize I have been serving the wrong forces. I should be in your ranks. Tonight was transforming for me.” It was signed by the state trooper who had been with him that night.
Belafonte also felt his heart turning towards Africa, and he got deeply involved in the African freedom movements, especially in South Africa, when it was still controlled by European powers. He co-founded TransAfrica, which created the economic sanctions against South Africa. He became a leading spokesperson for seeking an end to apartheid. He had become friends with Nelson Mandela while Mandela was still in prison. After Mandela’s release from prison, he asked HB to coordinate a tour of America. Belafonte agreed to share the duties with Roger Wilkins, and in 1990 Nelson Mandela came to America. The tour was an astonishing success.
. Here's how he humbly described his work: “All of us see the world as it exists; fewer envision what it might look like if made to change; and fewer still try to put together the people and ideas that make change happen. Paul Robeson was one; Martin Luther King, Jr. was one; Bobby Kennedy became one. And, of course, Nelson Mandela. I had just enough vision to see that they were visionaries, and to do what I could to help.” Harry Belafonte had eyes to see and ears to hear – as Jesus once put it, “If you have ears, then listen!” Belafonte listened and acted, and we are all so grateful that he did.