Breaking: Harry Belafonte -- singer, actor and civil rights activist -- died at his Manhattan home Tuesday of congestive heart failure. His wife Pamela was by his side.
Harry Belafonte, the award-winning entertainer who fueled an international calypso craze in the 1950s with his version of the “Banana Boat Song” and whose long career in show business paralleled his off-stage role as a civil rights activist and globe-trotting humanitarian, has died in New York.
In 1954, he became the first Black man to win a Tony Award — for best featured actor in a musical for his performance in the Broadway revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac” and six years later the first Black person to win an Emmy, for his performance in “The Revlon Revue: Tonight With Belafonte.”His 1956 album “Calypso,” which included “Jamaica Farewell” and “Day-O,” his version of the “Banana Boat Song,” was the first album to sell one million copies and charted at No.
And television, which was becoming a potent cultural force in America at the time, helped make Belafonte and his music popular to a vast audience “because people could see him, and his look was very important,” said Bogle. In 1957, Belafonte broke another color barrier — and stirred controversy — when he became the first Black American actor to play a romantic lead in a feature movie opposite a white leading lady in the Caribbean-set film “Island in the Sun.”
Belafonte, whose later film credits included “Buck and the Preacher,” “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Kansas City,” established one of the first all-Black music publishing companies in the late `50s. Belafonte already was politically active when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called him in 1956 to see if he’d meet with him at a Baptist church in Harlem while he was on a fund-raising swing for the group running the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.“It was a life-changing moment,” Belafonte recalled in a 2007 interview with The Guardian. “From then on, I was in his service and in his world of planning, strategy and thinking. We became very close immediately.
Throughout his long career, Belafonte continued to sing “Day-O,” having become, as he once described it, “an established part of American folk culture.”“I enjoy doing it very much,” he said, “and audiences enjoy it more than I do because they sing along with me — and they do it with gusto.” He made a number of visits to Jamaica when he was young. And in 1936, when he was 9, his mother took him and his 5-year-old brother, Dennis, to Jamaica to live full time to get away from what he later said were the dangers and temptations of living in Harlem.
That January, he hung venetian blinds for a tenant, an actress, who as a tip gave him two tickets to a play at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem.
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