Harry Belafonte, the celebrated singer, actor, songwriter, and social activist of Jamaican descent, has died. He was 96.
Belafonte’s publicist, Ken Sunshine confirmed the news to multiple United States media outlets, including CNN on Tuesday.
Belafonte died Tuesday morning of congestive heart failure at his Manhattan home, Sunshine said.
Harry Belafonte headed the list of 206 award recipients at the 2018 National Honours and Awards ceremony, staged at King’s House.
He received Jamaica’s fourth highest award, the Order of Merit (OM) for his outstanding contribution in the field of music.
Belafonte was dubbed the “King of Calypso” after the groundbreaking success of his 1956 hit, ‘The Banana Boat Song (Day-O).’
His acapella shout of “Day-O” and other traditional folk pieces like ‘Jamaica Farewell’ saw him shot to stardom.
A voracious reader with a burning disdain for injustice, Belafonte’s political consciousness was shaped by the experience of growing up as the impoverished son of a poor Jamaican mother who worked as a domestic servant.
Born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr on March 1, 1927 in New York city to poor Caribbean immigrants, his father worked as a cook on merchant ships and abandoned the family when Belafonte was young.
Belafonte also spent some of his boyhood in Jamaica, the former British colony and his mother’s native country, where he witnessed White English authorities mistreating Black Jamaicans. He returned to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood by 1940 to live with his mother, Melvine, who struggled to hold her family together amid grinding poverty.
“She was the one who taught him that you shouldn’t let the sun go down without fighting against injustice,” Judith E. Smith, author of “Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical,” says about Belafonte’s mother.
Belafonte had a tumultuous childhood and often had to fend for himself.
“The most difficult time in my life was when I was a kid,” he told a magazine interviewer. “My mother gave me affection, but, because I was left on my own, also a lot of anguish.”
Aside from his work in music and acting, Belafonte biggest contributions took place offstage.
He was a key strategist, fundraiser and mediator for the civil rights movement.
He continually risked his entertainment career — and at least once his life — for his activism. He became a close friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, who often retired to Belafonte’s palatial New York apartment to talk strategy or escape the pressures of leading the civil rights movement.
Additional reporting by CNN and JIS News
