Folk hero is the best description of what Harry Belafonte has come to signify among the various (many) careers you could give him, including singer, actor, entertainer, talk show host, and campaigner.
Not something one lists in their Twitter profile or on their business card. The label “folk hero” develops through time, out of importance. When you’re working at those other occupations, all of a sudden, the people, your community, and your nation depend on what you’re doing.
In this sense, Harry Belafonte was a folk hero. Not the most dynamic or unique performer you’ll ever see in an acting, singing, or dancing role. But the 96-year-old cat that passed away on Tuesday possessed something more, something as important.
He was cool, honest, charming, and seemed indestructible. In his own way, he was a people person. More tenaciously than any other celebrity throughout the civil rights period or after, he knew how to connect with people, educate and question them, keep them honest, and commit his stardom to a politics of responsibility.
The movies should have been the venue for this kind of moral evolution. However, that era’s Hollywood could only accept one Black individual, and it finally went with Sidney Poitier, a fellow Caribbean American and soul partner of Harry Belafonte. A few films were produced by Harry Belafonte early in his career. The meatiest of them is “Odds Against Tomorrow,” a naturalist film noir from 1959. It was also his final film for more than a decade. Poitier rose to fame as a movie star at a difficult time for this nation. Harry Belafonte rose to fame as a legend.
Of course, the songs—true folk music—came first. Belafonte’s interpolation, which took several different forms and combined acoustic singing with Black spiritual compositions and island sounds, was the solution. He performed for white audiences that were willing to spend a lot of money to see him play songs from his million-selling album “Calypso,” the one with “Day-O.” Knowing that people watched TV was a big part of his knowledge of other people.
Harry Belafonte envisioned something unique and seductive rather than merely adapting his popular cabaret performance for American living rooms. In 1959, he managed to persuade CBS to air “Tonight With Harry Belafonte,” an hour-long studio production that begins with a live ad for Revlon (the evening’s sponsor) and transitions from the gleaming blond actor Barbara Britton (the ad’s pitchperson) into the sight of Black men in the shadows and large chains.
They are miming laborious work while Harry Belafonte sings a viscous rendition of “Bald Headed Woman.” Percussive labour songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, radically sparse settings that allude to segregation and incarceration, and the weather system that went by the name of Odetta make up the entire hour. Never does Belafonte directly address injustice in his speeches. He puts his faith in the melodies and stagecraft to do the talking. People will understand it, especially Black people. They make the music.
In “My Song,” his book from 2011, Harry Belafonte stated, “the more I threw myself into political organising the bleaker my acting prospects looked.” Marches, demonstrations, and rallies were common forms of such organising. Money. He funded freedom rides and contributed to the civil rights struggle. Because Dr. King didn’t think he could pay it, he kept a life insurance policy on the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary. The 21-room castle he purchased at 300 West End Avenue in Manhattan and turned into seemed to serve as both the movement’s New York headquarters. “In my flat, Martin started writing his antiwar speech.” Belafonte was therefore close to the organisational and emotional hub of the movement.
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However, those dim Hollywood prospects—some inexplicable confluence of racism and too-raw talent—kept Harry Belafonte remarkably grounded and engaged in a form of cultural organising. Though he never completely stopped acting, the majority of his roles in Robert Altman movies—most notably “Kansas City” from 1996, in which he does some effective intimidation as a chilly 1930s gangster named Seldom Seen—are what have kept him in so many people’s lives for so many years.
His organising took place on television, where he appeared frequently during the 1960s as himself and where his political influence was perhaps equal to that of his soul mate. He did this by producing variety shows that exposed America to John Lewis, Gloria Lynne, and Odetta.
In February 1968, Belafonte took over the “Tonight Show” from Johnny Carson for that particular week. The Vietnam War and frustration with racial marginalisation, to name a few of them, have contributed to the nation’s descent into infernal unrest. (It would also be a depressing election year.) Whether a Black host of a well-known talk show was a cure for the doldrums or a provocative reflection of it, Harry Belafonte went beyond the lighthearted humour that was Carson’s strong suit.
He was enquiring. Poitier, Lena Horne, Bill Cosby, Paul Newman, Wilt Chamberlain, the Smothers Brothers, Zero Mostel, and, months before they were assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King were among his visitors that week. By fusing the frivolity of the format with the gravity of the time, Belafonte transformed the famous into everyday people.
Belafonte’s predecessor in an activity partially sparked by creative resentment was Paul Robeson. Robeson’s career was interrupted by his advocacy of racial equality for all people, which brought him persecution and hardship. He directly cautioned Harry Belafonte and Poitier about the toll that Black artists who think their fame and talent should accomplish more than dazzle and divert will have on our nation.
In part out of reverence for his older, Harry Belafonte wanted to assist lead white America to moral improvement wherever he could after witnessing the American government drag Robeson through hell. “My whole life was an homage to him,” Belafonte once said of Robeson. These stadiums featured everything from Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and “The Muppet Show” to “Free to Be… You and Me” and, on a number of unforgettable occasions, “Sesame Street.”
It might be difficult to reduce a legacy for some artists. What ultimately mattered was this? And it simply cannot be that Harry Belafonte’s illustrious career, which included many milestones, innovations, risks, dangers, triumphs, and setbacks, as well as his role as a living archive of the America he fought to elevate in the second half of the 20th century, can be reduced to the time he spent conversing with the Count.
Harry Belafonte
But it is also how a people person communicates with others. Harry Belafonte connected with many of us through young children who were naturally interested and receptive to the wonders of the human experience. Therefore, it seems logical that seeing this magnificent guy, who was reclining amid curious children and surly sensed animals, and listening to him talk with knowledge in that scratching tone about, instance, what an animal is (and, by implication, who an animal is not), taught us who we were.
People, sure, but potentially another generation of people who share this hero and are learning how to live their lives in his honour through the osmosis of quality television.