Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and wide-ranging activist, has died aged 96. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
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At the meeting with Chavez, in 2006, he described US president George W Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world”. He also characterised Bush’s Black secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as being like slaves who worked in their master’s house rather than in the fields.
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He was a frequent critic of Democrats, particularly Barack Obama, over issues including Guantanamo Bay detentions and the fight against rightwing extremism. He criticised Jay-Z and Beyoncé in 2012 for having “turned their back on social responsibility.
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Belafonte was born in 1927 in working-class Harlem, New York, and spent eight years of his childhood in his impoverished parents’ native Jamaica. He returned to New York for high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his early teens. He took odd jobs working in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up to the US navy aged 17 in March 1944, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.
After the war ended, he worked as a janitor’s assistant, but aspired to become an actor after watching plays at New York’s American Negro Theatre (along with fellow aspiring actor Sidney Poitier).
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Belafonte maintained an acting career alongside music, winning a Tony award in 1954.
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Bob Dylan’s first recording – playing harmonica – was on Belafonte’s 1962 album, Midnight Special.
Guardian
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