Born in 1927 in New York’s working class district of Harlem, Belafonte sang hits, won a Tony Award and an honorary Oscar for his acting, and for his 90th birthday his hometown of New York even named an entire library in Harlem after him.
“In the 1950s, when segregation was still rampant, his rise to the upper echelons of show business was historic,” the NYT noted. Belafonte was far more than a pioneer for black artists in the USA, but also used his prominence to fight for civil and human rights.
He fought alongside Martin Luther King Jr. for black civil rights in the USA, with Nelson Mandela against apartheid in South Africa and as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador for children in Haiti and Sudan. He also supported left-wing politicians such as Fidel Castro from Cuba and Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, as recalled by the British “Guardian”, among others.
“Daaaay-Ooo”
Belafonte spent much of his youth in his mother’s Jamaican homeland. He returned to New York to attend high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out as a teenager. He took odd jobs in markets and the city’s garment district, and in March 1944, at the age of 17, enlisted in the US Navy, where he worked as a munitions loader on a base in New Jersey.
He then attended the legendary acting school of the émigré German director Erwin Piscator in New York with colleagues such as Tony Curtis and Marlon Brando. He would have liked to have become the “first black Hamlet”, as he once said in an interview. Instead, it became Hollywood with more than 40 films, including Bright Road (1953) and Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954).
Music was added, and Belafonte, son of a Martinique ship’s cook and a Jamaican laborer, became the “Calypso King”. Belafonte once became a world star with two long drawn-out syllables: “Daaaay-Ooo” he sings at the start of the calypso hit “Banana Boat Song”, which has long been a catchy tune. In total, Belafonte sold well over 100 million records with songs like “Island in the Sun”, “Matilda” and “Jump in the Line”.
“Black art was always encrypted”
Behind the cheerful holiday music is an outcry against slavery. “That’s how my ancestors packaged their protest. Black art was always encrypted,” as Belafonte once said.
Away from the music, he doesn’t encode his criticism – whether it’s against presidents like George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump or his fellow musicians, whom he accused of no longer taking care of their “social duties”.
In his autobiography “My Song”, published in 2012, Belafonte also spoke of his darker sides, of his gambling addiction and infidelity, for example. Two marriages broke up, in the third marriage the father of four children had been married to the photographer Pamela Frank since 2008.
