Harry Belafonte, a ‘radical before it was chic,’ sang for justice

Actor and singer Harry Belafonte was one of the biggest celebrities of his time: His 1956 album, “Calypso,” held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard pop albums chart for 31 weeks, and his iconic version of the Jamaican work song “Day-O” is recognized the world over. But an admiring new biography of the star demonstrates that Belafonte was more passionate about the work he was performing away from the spotlight – from bankrolling the Civil Rights Movement to brokering talks between Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedys.“Daylight Come,” by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, captures the epic sweep of its subject’s long life. Belafonte, born in Harlem in 1927 to Caribbean immigrants, had a difficult childhood. His father, a cook on United Fruit Co. ships, was in and out of his life. Meanwhile, his mother frequently sent young Harry and his brother to her native Jamaica to stay with her mother or in a series of boarding houses while she worked as a domestic in New York City.Belafonte, who struggled academically, dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He worked menial jobs until 1944, when he was old enough to enlist in the U.S. Navy. He was stationed stateside through the end of World War II, loading military ships bound for the Pacific. Why We Wrote This The new biography “Daylight Come” focuses on Harry Belafonte’s determination to use his fame to confront discrimination in the U.S. and abroad. Written by author and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, the book succeeds in elucidating the performer’s cultural significance. The armed forces were racially segregated then, and Jelly-Schapiro notes that Belafonte’s time among Black seamen “supplied him, as a high school dropout who became a proud autodidact, with his essential political education.” His fellow service members introduced him to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black intellectuals. Fryderyk Gabowicz/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP/File Harry Belafonte performs in 1981. Back in New York after being discharged, Belafonte was given a ticket to see a play at the American Negro Theatre. Enthralled, he began volunteering there as a stagehand, and eventually, the handsome and charismatic young man was asked to read for parts. He soon met another 19-year-old aspiring actor, Sidney Poitier, whom Belafonte called his “first friend.” Both were hungry to see plays but short on funds, so, as Jelly-Schapiro reports, they would purchase a single ticket, with Poitier attending the first act and then, during intermission, summarizing the action for Belafonte, who would swap places with him to see the second.“Singing wasn’t his passion,” the author observes of Belafonte, but he was cast in a theater role that required him to sing, and people noticed that he could carry a tune. By 1949, he had married his first wife, Marguerite, and they were expecting a child. In need of steady income, he landed a regular nightclub gig in Manhattan. His successful club engagements led to a record contract.He started out singing folk music but found his sound with the runaway hit album “Calypso,” which, in Jelly-Schapiro’s words, “evoked a generic pan-Caribbean: a fantasy Antillean world easy on the ears and minds of Americans.” During the 1950s, Belafonte also won groundbreaking roles in films, including “Carmen Jones” and “Island in the Sun.” Considering his wide appeal to white audiences, Belafonte opined in his 2011 memoir that he was “Black, but ... not too black.”Belafonte met King in 1956, when the young minister traveled to New York seeking support for the mass boycott of segregated buses then underway in Montgomery, Alabama. The two men became friends, and in the coming years, Belafonte worked closely with King in addition to donating generously to civil rights causes. He arranged a meeting between King and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960. While Kennedy was in office, Belafonte frequently mediated between King and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother. He refereed conflicts within the movement as well, as the young activists who would go on to embrace Black Power grew impatient with King’s leadership. In addition, Belafonte corralled famous friends including Marlon Brando and Paul Newman to march for civil rights. "DAYLIGHT COME: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made," by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Penguin Press, 384 pp. “Daylight Come” succeeds in elucidating Belafonte’s cultural significance. He headed his own production company and produced a number of remarkable television specials, including a 1966 tribute to the Harlem Renaissance written by Langston Hughes. Late-night host Johnny Carson turned “The Tonight Show” over to Belafonte for an extraordinary week in February 1968, during which Belafonte talked politics with King, Robert Kennedy, Zero Mostel, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, among others. While hosting the show, Belafonte – then married to his second wife, Julie Robinson, who was white – aired “home videos of his interracial family waterskiing on vacation in Las Vegas,” Jelly-Schapiro writes. To convey how meaningful this was, the author reports that around the same time, a brouhaha erupted over a television special featuring a duet between Belafonte and British singer Petula Clark: A corporate sponsor protested because the white Clark had touched Belafonte’s arm during the performance.Belafonte spoke openly about his ambivalent relationship with fame, at times feeling resentful of the expectations placed on him and fearful that he wouldn’t live up to them. But as a person, as opposed to an icon, he remains remote throughout the book. Jelly-Schapiro alludes several times to an anger that drove the star; he observes, “Harry, for those closest to him, isn’t always the easiest to be around.” The author references tensions in Belafonte’s first two marriages (he was married to his third wife, Pamela Frank, when he died) and calls Belafonte an “inconstant” father.While these vague characterizations add up to a blurry picture of Belafonte’s personality, his deeply felt work as an activist comes through clearly. That work continued well beyond the tumult of the 1960s. In the 1980s, he was a vocal opponent of South Africa’s apartheid regime. The supergroup USA for Africa, which recorded the single “We Are the World” for African famine relief in 1985, was Belafonte’s brainchild.A 1996 profile of Belafonte by writer Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted that the singer “was radical before it was chic and remained so long after it wasn’t.” Jelly-Schapiro attests that the star’s political commitment never wavered, with Belafonte, who died at age 96 in 2023, remaining a “crotchety radical” to the end.