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Harry Belafonte (born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.; March 1, 1927 – April 25, 2023) was an American singer, actor, and civil rights activist who popularized calypso music with international audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte's career breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP by a single artist.
Apr 25, 2023 · Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights...
Mar 3, 2024 · Recent News. Harry Belafonte (born March 1, 1927, New York City, New York, U.S.—died April 25, 2023, New York City, New York) was an American singer, actor, producer, and activist who was a key figure in the folk music scene of the 1950s, especially known for popularizing the Caribbean folk songs known as calypsos.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Apr 25, 2023 · Singer, actor and human rights activist Harry Belafonte died Tuesday at age 96 of congestive heart failure. He broke racial barriers and balanced his activism with his artistry in ways that made...
- Elizabeth Blair
- Active Almost to The Very End
- An Egot Winner and A Lifetime of Awards
- Best Known For 'Day-O'
- Always A Trailblazer
- At The Forefront of The Civil Rights Movement
As recently as 2018 he made a bone-chilling appearance in the movie “BlacKkKlansman,” portraying an older civil rights leader who recounts the judicial railroading and brutal lynching of Jesse Washington, a Black teenage farmhand, in Waco, Texas, in 1916. Belafonte, after several years of poor health, had to get his doctor’s permission to shoot the...
Belafonte received most of the major honors the U.S. reserves for its revered artists and performers, among them the Kennedy Center Honors in 1989, the National Medal of Arts in 1994, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, the BET Humanitarian Award in 2006, the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 2013 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award ...
The album — which included Belafonte’s signature number, “Day-O (Banana Boat Song),” with its unforgettable Jamaican dockworker’s lament — spent 99 weeks on the charts, 31 of them at No. 1, which remains the fourth-longest run in Billboard chart history. It also established calypso, an African Caribbean folk blend rooted in Trinidad and Tobago, as ...
It was one of many boundary-pushing moments throughout Belafonte’s life and career — in April 1968, for example, a TV special starring Belafonte and the white pop singer Petula Clark created a national stir because Clark briefly touched his arm during a duet. Such incidents only empowered Belafonte, whose social consciousness began to emerge during...
It was Belafonte who put up the money in 1963 to bail King out of jail in Alabama, where King most forcefully articulated the civil rights strategy of nonviolence in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Belafonte became associated with King in 1956 at a New York fundraising event for activists working in Montgomery, Alabama. King later said Belafonte...
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- Alex Johnson,Diana Dasrath
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Apr 25, 2023 · Harry Belafonte, the dashing singer, actor and activist who became an indispensable supporter of the civil rights movement, has died, his publicist Ken Sunshine told CNN. He was 96.
Apr 25, 2023 · Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and civil rights activist who broke down racial barriers, has died aged 96. As well as performing global hits such as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a...