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Harry Belafonte, the dashing singer, actor and activist who grew to become an indispensable supporter of the civil rights motion, has died, his publicist Ken Sunshine advised CNN.

He was 96.

Belafonte died Tuesday early morning of congestive coronary heart failure, Sunshine said.

Belafonte was dubbed the “King of Calypso” just after the groundbreaking accomplishment of his 1956 strike, “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O).” He also turned a film star right after performing in the movie adaption of the Broadway musical, “Carmen Jones.”

But Belafonte greatest contributions took spot offstage. He was a essential strategist, fundraiser and mediator for the civil legal rights motion. He continuously risked his enjoyment job — and at least when his daily life — for his activism. He turned a close good friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who usually retired to Belafonte’s palatial New York condominium to communicate approach or escape the pressures of top the civil rights motion.

A voracious reader with a burning disdain for injustice, Belafonte’s political consciousness was shaped by the encounter of rising up as the impoverished son of a poor Jamaican mom who labored as a domestic servant.

“I’ve normally responded to queries that request, ‘When as an artist did you choose to turn out to be an activist?'” he as soon as said. “My response to the question is that I was an activist extensive in advance of I turned an artist. They both assistance every other, but the activism is 1st.”

The scope of Belafonte’s activism was astonishing. He noticed the civil legal rights movement as a international wrestle. He led a campaign versus apartheid in South Africa, and befriended Nelson Mandela. He mobilized assistance for the struggle against HIV/AIDS and turned a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He also came up with the plan for recording the 1985 hit music, “We Are the Entire world,” which assembled a constellation of pop and rock stars, including Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, to increase money for famine reduction in Africa.

Belafonte failed to mellow as his wealth and fame grew. He drew criticism immediately after calling U.S. President George W. Bush “the greatest terrorist in the earth” for leading an invasion of Iraq, and assailed Black stars these types of as Jay Z and Beyonce for not getting bolder stands on social justice. He criticized Barack Obama so a lot for the duration of the then Senator’s initially presidential operate in 2008 that Obama requested him, “When are you likely to slice me some slack?”

“What make you consider that is not what I have been doing?” Belafonte responded.

BELAFONTE’S HERO AND MENTOR

Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born March 1, 1927 in New York city to very poor Caribbean immigrants. His father worked as a prepare dinner on service provider ships and deserted the loved ones when Belafonte was youthful. Belafonte also expended some of his boyhood in Jamaica, the previous British colony and his mother’s native state, in which he witnessed White English authorities mistreating Black Jamaicans. He returned to New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood by 1940 to stay with his mother, Melvine, who struggled to hold her loved ones collectively amid grinding poverty.

“She was the one particular who taught him that you should not let the sunshine go down with out fighting towards injustice,” Judith E. Smith, writer of “Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Community Radical,” suggests about Belafonte’s mom.

Belafonte had a tumultuous childhood and frequently had to fend for himself.

“The most challenging time in my lifestyle was when I was a kid,” he explained to a magazine interviewer. “My mom gave me passion, but, simply because I was left on my own, also a large amount of anguish.”

Belafonte dropped out of higher faculty and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1944. He was relegated to manual labour on the ship and didn’t see combat, but the expertise proved to be profound. He achieved higher education educated Black guys who gave him a wider publicity to the environment, speaking to him about big issues these types of as segregation and colonialism. The practical experience of fighting against facism abroad while coming back again to segregation at house angered Belafonte, a lot like many Black veterans from the 2nd Planet War.

He drifted into the leisure industry nearly by accident. Belafonte was functioning as a janitor in New York when he attended a participate in at the American Negro Theater. He was so swept up by the effectiveness that he decided to turn into an actor.

He at some point researched acting at a workshop attended by classmates these as Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis and Bea Arthur. He also fell into singing in nightclubs — the moment in a band that incorporated jazz greats Charlie Parker and Max Roach — and landed a recording contract in 1949.

Belafonte had pure charisma, on stage and behind the microphone. He gained a Tony Award for his performing on Broadway and was the first African American to gain an Emmy award for his 1959 assortment exhibit.

Belafonte also appeared for a way to merge his activism with his job and found a mentor and close friend in Paul Robeson. The Black stage and film actor was a renaissance man, a star athlete and Ivy League-educated mental who turned an outspoken civil rights activist and a critic of U.S. overseas policy. Robeson was eventually blacklisted for his activism through the McCarthy era.

Belafonte referred to as Robeson section of his “ethical compass.”

“For me, Mr. Robeson was the sparrow. He was an artist who produced individuals of us in the arts realize the depth of that contacting, when he mentioned, “Artists are the gatekeepers of fact. We are civilization’s radical voice.”

HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH MLK

Belafonte also constructed a friendship with King, a further potent Black chief. King often flew to New York Town to raise dollars for the motion and to fulfill important advisers. Throughout one particular trip, he named Belafonte, greeting him with, “We’ve hardly ever satisfied, so you may perhaps not know who I am.”

The two adult males fulfilled at a New York church where by King was talking and retired soon after the celebration to a basement room to talk.

“It was just us at a card table with straight-again chairs,” Belafonte recalled. “What was supposed to be a several minutes led to virtually 4 hrs. I preferred his bravery, his feelings, his concepts and his mission. I dedicated to him following that.”

Belafonte’s partnership with King would show to be essential. Belafonte had star electric power, connections, and much more importantly, a willingness to chance all to support the civil rights motion. He lifted cash for the Southern Christian Leadership Convention, the business that King co-launched and led. Belafonte also aided bail out activists who had been jailed for the duration of civil rights strategies, and helped arrange the 1963 March on Washington.

He risked more than his career at situations. In 1964, Belafonte and his mate and fellow actor Sidney Poitier travelled to Mississippi to provide a doctor’s bag crammed with US$70,000 to support voter registration attempts. Belafonte claims the pair ended up chased and shot at by the Ku Klux Klan but sooner or later succeeded in hand-delivering their income.

Belafonte delivered critical support to King’s spouse and children as nicely. He paid out for housekeepers and babysitters while King travelled the nation. And he took out a everyday living insurance policy policy for the civil legal rights chief that became a single of the family’s primary resources of economical assistance right after King’s assassination.

“Any time we acquired into problems or when tragedy struck, Harry has often come to our assist, his generous coronary heart extensive open up,” Coretta Scott King later explained in her memoir.

Belafonte also turned a person of King’s most trustworthy good friends. King often stayed in Belafonte’s Higher West Aspect apartment, and he wrote the define to just one of his most famed speeches — his 1967 handle denouncing the Vietnam War — in Belafonte’s dwelling.

King was a self-contained gentleman in community who almost never permit his guard down. But in scarce photos that seize King breaking into a substantial, uninhibited grin, Belafonte is frequently at his side, hugging him and sharing some private joke. There is a great YouTube clip demonstrating King telling a joke to Belafonte when the entertainer filled in as a host on “The Tonight Display.”

Belafonte provided a lot more than psychological assistance to King, nevertheless. King relied on him for assistance and method, says Miller, author of “Turning into Belafonte.”

“He (Belafonte) was now a radical and currently considering about how Black liberation need to unfold,” Miller states. “He had by now been in these teams the place all people was speaking about, what should you to do to organize? How do you make alter?”

BELAFONTE IN HIS Later Years

Remaining a radical was essential to how Belafonte defined himself. As he got older, his silky singing voice decreased to a gravelly whisper and he walked with a cane. But he hardly ever misplaced his motion picture-star seems to be or his starvation for radical alter. In 2013, he was awarded the NAACP’s highest honour, the Spingarn Medal. He said for the duration of his acceptance speech that what was missing from the present-day wrestle for liberty is “radical imagined.”

“The usa has in no way been moved to ideal our desire for higher democracy without radical considering and radical voices staying at the helm of any these quest,” he stated.

Belafonte also was a recipient of a Kennedy Centre Honor in 1989, the Countrywide Medal of Arts in 1994 and a Grammy Life time Accomplishment Award in 2000. He also became a mentor to other artists, just as Robeson had inspired him a long time in advance of.

He spoke with delight about the racial protests that distribute throughout the U.S. in the summertime of 2020 right after the death of George Floyd, crafting that “we have never experienced so lots of White allies, wailing to stand together for flexibility, for honour, for a justice that cost-free us all in the conclusion…”

A team of Black students approached Belafonte in Harlem in 2016 and questioned if there was just about anything he was however seeking for, despite his state-of-the-art age.

“What I’ve normally been on the lookout for: Wherever resides the rebel coronary heart?” Belafonte replied. “With no the rebellious heart, with no people today who understand that there is certainly no sacrifice we can make that is too good to retrieve that which we’ve shed, we will without end be distracted with belongings and trinkets and title.”

Belafonte by no means missing his rebellious heart. Blessed with appears, wealth and fame, he could have been content material with staying the King of Calypso. But he produced an additional alternative. His built his most important contributions offstage.