Harry Belafonte, singer who broke racial barriers, dies at 96

Singer and activist Harry Belafonte, who smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with the power of his folk music and then become a major force in the civil rights movement, has died. He was 96.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his spokesman said.

Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants in 1927, he pioneered a frenzy for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell”. His album “Calypso” reached number 1 in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks, selling more than a million copies, the first album by a single artist before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley soon after.

From the 1950s onwards his primary focus was civil rights, becoming a supporter of Martin Luther King Jr, and financing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

He took part in the March on Washington in 1963. His spacious apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan became King’s home away from home. He quietly maintained an insurance policy on King’s life, with his family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure the family was taken care of after King was assassinated in 1968.

Belafonte’s fame transcended racial boundaries, becoming a rare Black face in entertainment like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald before him. His role in the 1957 movie “Island in the Sun”, which contained the suggestion of a romance between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, generated outrage in the South; a bill was even introduced in the South Carolina Legislature that would have fined any theatre showing the film. In Atlanta for a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1962, he was twice refused service in the same restaurant. Television appearances with white female singers, Petula Clark in 1968 and Julie Andrews in 1969, angered many viewers.

Belafonte also made news for a movie he turned down, citing what he called its negative racial stereotypes, the 1959 screen version of “Porgy and Bess”. The role of Porgy was offered instead to his old friend Sydney Poitier, whom he criticized publicly for accepting it. His final film role was in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” in 2018.

In the 1980s he helped organise a cultural boycott of South Africa as well as the Live Aid concert and the all-star recording “We Are the World”, both of which raised money to fight famine in Africa.

He remained politically active to the end. On Election Day 2016, the New York Times published an opinion article by Belafonte urging people not to vote for Donald J. Trump, whom he called “feckless and immature.”

“Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose,” he wrote, referring to African American voters, “and we must answer: Only the dream, only everything.”