Harry Belafonte

Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born on the first of March 1927 in Harlem, to Melvine, a Jamaican domestic worker, and Harold Sr., a cook of Caribbean birth. Much of his childhood passed in Jamaica with his grandmother before Harlem took him back in 1940; the Navy took him in 1944; and the stage took him for good — the American Negro Theatre beside Sidney Poitier, then Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop among classmates named Brando, Curtis, and Matthau.

His club debut in January 1949 at the Royal Roost was backed by players from Charlie Parker's band. RCA Victor signed him; Broadway gave him the 1954 Tony for John Murray Anderson's Almanac; Otto Preminger gave him Carmen Jones. Then Calypso (1956) — widely credited as the first album by a single artist to sell a million copies — held Billboard's number one for thirty-one weeks, Day-O and Jamaica Farewell aboard, and the press crowned him the King of Calypso, a title he himself resisted. In 1960 he became the first Black person to win an Emmy, for Tonight with Belafonte; his own HarBel Productions made Odds Against Tomorrow; his last picture, at ninety-one, was Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman.

The movement had no steadier friend among the famous. He met Martin Luther King Jr. in March 1956 in the basement of Abyssinian Baptist Church and became confidant, adviser, and one of the struggle's most important funders — bailing out jailed marchers, sustaining SNCC, marshaling Hollywood's delegation to the 1963 March on Washington, and in August 1964, with Poitier at his side, carrying seventy thousand dollars in cash to the Freedom Summer workers at Greenwood, Mississippi. In 1985 he initiated the We Are the World famine-relief project; from 1987 he served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

The honors gathered — Kennedy Center Honors 1989, the National Medal of Arts 1994, a Grammy for a lifetime, the Jean Hersholt humanitarian Oscar in 2014 — and he wore each one as a tool for the work. He died at his Manhattan home of congestive heart failure on the twenty-fifth of April 2023, at ninety-six. Honored be Harry Belafonte, who sang the world open and spent the fame on freedom.