Award-winning actor, singer and activist Harry Belafonte, a persistent and outspoken voice for justice and racial equality in the United States and around the world, died Tuesday at age 96.
Belafonte died of congestive heart failure at his New York home, his representatives confirmed to the Daily News.
Belafonte, across a groundbreaking seven-decade career, became the first Black Emmy winner and recorded the first-ever million-selling full-length album by any artist. He was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1989, a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2001 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award Oscar in 2014.
The New York native, a close friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., drew equal attention for his unapologetic embrace of progressive political causes both at home and abroad. Belafonte became a prominent face in the American civil rights movement, called loudly for the end of apartheid in South Africa and voiced his opposition to the war in Iraq.
He helped arrange for Nelson Mandela’s postprison visit to the U.S., including a speech before a jam-packed Yankee Stadium crowd in June 1990.
More recently, Belafonte — a longtime resident of the Upper West Side — ripped the Trump administration as the “Fourth Reich.”
“I wasn’t an artist who became an activist,” he reflected on his 90th birthday. “I was an activist who became an artist.”
Belafonte was also one of the driving forces behind “We Are the World,” the star-studded charity single that raised more than $60 million for Ethiopian famine relief after its 1985 release. He appeared in the video with an assortment of fellow musical legends, including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan.
Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born in Harlem, the son of Caribbean immigrants who Americanized the spelling of their surname Bellanfanti. His mom worked as a dressmaker and house cleaner, while his father worked as a cook for merchant ships before leaving his family to marry another woman.
The newly single parent and her son returned to his mother’s native Jamaica in 1935, fleeing to avoid paying back rent. They spent seven years there before a 1942 New York City homecoming.
Belafonte dropped out of the ninth grade after struggling in his studies with undiagnosed dyslexia, left high school for a World War II stint in the U.S. Navy and returned home to a job as a janitor’s assistant.
The low-paying position turned into an unexpected windfall after actress Clarice Taylor gave him free tickets to an American Negro Theatre production as a tip for his work in her Harlem apartment.
The show would transform his life: Belafonte quickly volunteered to work as an American Negro Theatre handyman and met a theater janitor named Sidney Poitier. They became lifelong friends. The two were soon performing alongside Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis before audiences that included Paul Robeson and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Davis became a close friend and poker buddy.
Belafonte found himself taking acting lessons alongside Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger and Elaine Stritch at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School. The multitalented entertainer also started singing in the Royal Roost, a jazz club where he was backed by soon-to-be-legendary jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.
But he embraced folk music after seeing performances by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger at the Village Vanguard, where Belafonte brought his act and earned $70 a week. His repertoire ran the gamut from traditional folks songs to “Hava Nagila” to the music of Jamaica.
By 1949, Belafonte landed a recording contract. And in 1956, he made history.
“Day-O (Banana Boat Song)” became a massive hit off Belafonte’s album “Calypso,” which sold an unheard of 1 million copies. Belafonte noted the chart-topping single was in part a reflection on his family’s roots.
“It’s a song about my father, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said.
The hit single was improbably resurrected to great comedic effect in the 1988 movie “Beetlejuice.”
The handsome Belafonte found fast success as an actor, too.
In 1953, he earned a Tony Award for supporting actor in his Broadway debut, “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac,” and first appeared on the silver screen in the movie “Bright Road.”
A year later, he was starring opposite Dorothy Dandridge in the hit musical film “Carmen Jones” as his movie career took off. His 1959 television special “Tonight With Belafonte” earned the young star an Emmy Award.
As he and Poitier achieved success as entertainers, the pair became deeply involved with King’s nonviolent movement for civil rights. Belafonte was introduced to King in the basement of a Harlem church, with local political legend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. doing the honors.
When King famously landed inside the Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, Belafonte raised $50,000 to bail his friend out. Months later, he and Poitier helped King organize the massive Aug. 28, 1963, march on Washington.
Belafonte, accompanied by Poitier, raised and personally delivered $70,000 to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in August 1964 to support its Mississippi Summer Project, an effort to register African-American voters.
The pair survived an ambush by KKK members who tried to force their vehicle off the road.
Belafonte and King shared a deep bond that endured beyond the civil rights leader’s April 1968 assassination in Memphis. The singer/actor served as one of the executors of MLK’s estate and was chairman of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Fund.
“Whenever we got into trouble or when tragedy struck, Harry has always come to our aid, his generous heart wide open,” said King’s widow, Coretta Scott King.
The politically active Belafonte steered clear of acting gigs for much of the ’60s to focus on his musical career and his work as the first African-American television producer.
His 1960 album “Swing Dat Hammer” earned a Grammy Award for best folk performance, and a collaboration with South African singer Miriam Makeba won the pair a 1965 Grammy for the album “An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba.”
During the recording of his 1962 album “Midnight Special,” Belafonte brought in a recently transplanted Minnesota musician to play harmonica. The young man, named Bob Dylan, made his recording debut playing on the title track.
Pals Poitier and Belafonte collaborated in the ’70s films “Buck and the Preacher” and “Uptown Saturday Night.” After a lengthy break, Belafonte returned to the movies in the ’90s — first playing himself in the 1992 Hollywood insider film “The Player.”
When South African leader Mandela was freed from prison, Belafonte was among those who arranged for the anti-apartheid fighter to take an eight-city American tour.
Belafonte was married three times, with two children each from his first two marriages to Marguerite Byrd and dancer Julie Robinson. His third wife was photographer Pamela Frank; the two were married in 2008.
Daughter Shari Belafonte, from his marriage to Byrd, emerged as an actress, model, writer and singer. Daughter Gina, from his second union, became an actress as well with a role on “The Commish” and an appearance in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.”
Belafonte is survived by Frank, who was with him when he died, as well as his four children, two stepchildren and eight grandchildren.
Belafonte, reflecting on life before his 90th birthday, provided himself with a succinct epitaph.
“I’ve always looked at the world and thought, ‘What can I do next? Where do we go from here? How can we fix it?’ ” he said.
“And that’s still how I look at the world, because there is so much to be done.”
