Harry Belafonte

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 movement, died on Tuesday April 25 2023 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96. Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music. He was equally successful as a concert attraction. Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man - but making movies was never his priority. His primary focus from the late 1950s on was civil rights. He befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter of Dr. King. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He quietly maintained an insurance policy on Dr. King’s life, with the King family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure that the family was taken care of after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. He divorced Marguerite Byrd in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, who had been the only white member of Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe. He and Ms. Byrd had two children, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte, who survive him, as do his two children by Ms. Robinson, Gina Belafonte and David; and eight grandchildren. He and Ms. Robinson divorced in 2004, and he married Pamela Frank, a photographer, in 2008. She survives him, too, along with a stepdaughter, Sarah Frank; a stepson, Lindsey Frank; and three step-grandchildren.