The Full Biography
Harry Belafonte. Singer. Actor. Organizer. The Harlem kid who made a Jamaican work song into an American number-one, then spent decades treating fame as a door that had to be kicked for other people.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is an open shirt, a grin, “Day-O” as a ballpark weather, or a man on the Mall in 1963. What the still cannot show is Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. of Harlem and Jamaica, a janitor’s and a domestic’s son, the first million-selling album in the modern pop sense, and a second life of bail money, a King friendship, South Africa, and a death in 2023 that the calypso has never been allowed to reduce him to.
He was born on March 1, 1927, in Harlem Hospital, the son of Melvine Love, from Jamaica, who worked as a domestic, and Harold George Bellanfanti Sr., a cook from Martinique who also worked as a janitor. The household moved. From 1932 to 1940 the boy lived with his grandmother in Jamaica, in the hills above Kingston, and learned the island the way a child learns a second first room. He came back to New York, finished George Washington High School, and in 1944 enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The war ended before the service made a combat file of him. He came home a young man who had already been two countries and a uniform.
The door was not a recording booth. It was a theater. On the G.I. Bill he enrolled at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, where Erwin Piscator ran a room that also held Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, Tony Curtis, and Bea Arthur. He was an actor first. He took jobs as a janitor’s assistant and, for a stretch, as a class A’s helper in the garment district. He sang at the Royal Roost, a jazz club on Broadway, because the singing paid more than the early parts. “Matilda” was an early calypso he learned to work a room with. In 1953 he appeared in John Murray Anderson’s Almanac on Broadway and won a Tony as a featured actor in a musical. The town still files him as a boat song. The first prize was a play.
RCA Victor signed him. The folk and calypso sides stacked. Then Calypso (1956), with “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” an album that sat at number one on the Billboard pop chart for thirty-one weeks and became the first LP widely reported to sell a million copies in a year. A Jamaican dock chant, arranged for American living rooms, made him the country’s idea of the Caribbean. He knew what the song was — a work song, not a novelty. He also knew what the checks could do. “Mary’s Boy Child,” the same year, topped the British chart at Christmas. “Banana Boat (Day-O)” crossed over as a single. “Jump in the Line” waited its turn and then outlived him in other people’s movies. He was, for a stretch of the late 1950s, the most complete male pop star the country had hired from the islands, and he treated the hire as a treasury, not a personality.
Hollywood used the face. Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), opposite Dorothy Dandridge, put him in a Bizet reset the Production Code still handled as a problem. He did not sing on the soundtrack; his speaking voice and the camera were the job. Island in the Sun (1957), from Alec Waugh, made a Black leading man a box-office argument in the last years of formal segregation; Joan Fontaine was the costar the columns could not stop talking about. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) put him in an emptied New York with Inger Stevens. Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), for Robert Wise, is the picture the cinephiles keep: a heist that is also a racial weather, with Robert Ryan, a jazz score, and a Black producer’s name on the file — Belafonte’s company, HarBel. He was not a singer who visited movies. He was an actor who used the movies when the songs had already paid the rent.
Television made a second door. In 1959 the special Tonight with Belafonte won him an Emmy — the first time a Black man had taken the award. He booked the Revlon hour and then fought the sponsor when the hour would not hold integrated company the way he wanted. He was already treating a network as a picket line you could walk in a tuxedo. The same year he recorded Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, a live double that stayed on the chart for years and is still the concert document people mean when they mean him in a room.
The movement was the other job, and it was not a charity photo. He had met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956, after the Montgomery boycott had already begun, and the friendship held until Memphis. In the spring of 1963 he raised fifty thousand dollars — a fortune in that year’s money — to bail King and others out of the Birmingham jail. He underwrote Freedom Riders. He put SNCC organizers on a payroll when the organization could not. He hosted strategy nights in his New York apartment. At the March on Washington he was not a decoration; he helped assemble the Hollywood wing — Brando, Poitier, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Joanne Woodward, Lena Horne — so the cameras would have to photograph more than a speech. He flew south when flying south was a risk to a career that was already a target. He put the Calypso checks into a movement that could not invoice a record company.
The 1960s and 1970s kept both instruments. He recorded Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall. He made The Angel Levine (1970) with Zero Mostel. He produced and starred with Poitier in Buck and the Preacher (1972), a Western that put Black Union soldiers and a wagon train on a frontier the studio Western had reserved for other faces. Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let’s Do It Again (1975) used him as a leading man in Black studio comedy, opposite Poitier and Bill Cosby, a different temperature from the boat song. He never became a mascot of any of it. He became, instead, a man who would say the unhelpful sentence in a helpful room — about Vietnam, about the FBI’s file on King, about a Democratic Party he would not flatter. He recorded The Midnight Special and folk sides that kept the work-song ear after the novelty had moved on. He produced the 1966 CBS special The Strollin’ Twenties with Langston Hughes’s words and Duke Ellington’s music, a Black variety hour the network treated as a risk. In 1968, after Memphis, he kept the King household in money and in a New York apartment when the movement’s banker was suddenly a man without the friend the checks had been for. He did not make a hymn of that year. He kept writing checks.
I wasn’t an artist who became an activist. I was an activist who became an artist.Harry Belafonte
The turn is the decision that the album would be a treasury, not a personality. A lot of 1950s pop stars became residencies. He became a movement’s banker and irritant. The decades after King include fights with the left and the right. He did not sand those down. A complete life of a conscience has to hold the sharpness as well as the 1963 still.
Six things most people never knew
- Harlem and Jamaica are both first rooms. Bellanfanti. A back-and-forth childhood. The calypso is a home, not a costume.
- The Dramatic Workshop came before the boat song. Brando and Poitier as classmates. He was an actor who sang to eat.
- Calypso is a work-song album that became a pop climate. 1956. Thirty-one weeks at number one. He knew the difference. The checks remember the climate. He remembered the work.
- The bail and the plane tickets are the ledger. King. Birmingham, 1963. Fifty thousand dollars. SNCC on a payroll. A career used as a wallet.
- He stayed sharp past the point where saints are supposed to soften. Interviews that made allies wince. The file includes the wince.
- He died at ninety-six, still not a mascot. 2023. The Mall still. The sentence still.
His children — Adrienne and Shari with Marguerite Byrd; David and Gina with Julie Robinson — have had to share a father who is a movement and a song. Shari became an actress the public already knew how to look at. Friends from the 1960s rooms describe a man who could be royal about a bill and late to a rehearsal because the bill was the rehearsal. The Belafonte of the last decades did not retire the unhelpful sentence. He died with it still in his mouth.
The later years
Home, after the album had already become a civic object, was New York — an Upper West Side apartment that had been a movement office as often as a living room — and, for long stretches, a house that also held Julie Robinson, the dancer he married in 1957 after the first marriage ended. That second marriage held for forty-seven years. They divorced in 2006. In 2008 he married Pamela Frank, the concert violinist. He did not perform those chapters for the columns. He kept working.
The work he loved in those decades was not another calypso season. In 1985 he was among the people who forced We Are the World into being — the USA for Africa session, the famine brief, a room of stars he treated as a shift, not a party. He had already been to Africa on UNICEF business; in 1987 he became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and used the title as a job, the way he had used the March. He went at apartheid the way he had gone at Birmingham: money, flights, a refusal to let a government call itself a partner while the jails filled. He stood with the ANC when that stand still cost American bookings. He recorded when he wanted to and refused when a promoter wanted only “Day-O.”
He did not vanish from a camera. Kansas City (1996), for Robert Altman, put him in a 1930s crime weather as Seldom Seen. White Man’s Burden (1995) asked him to play power in a reversed America. Bobby (2006) used the face as a kitchen-staff elder on the night Robert Kennedy was shot. He narrated and appeared in documentaries that were, in practice, briefings. In 2011 he published My Song, written with Michael Shnayerson, a memoir that is a ledger of rooms and checks and arguments, not a souvenir book. The same year the film Sing Your Song put the movement years on a screen for people who had only inherited the boat chant.
The honors arrived as a civic inventory. Kennedy Center Honors, 1989. The National Medal of Arts, 1994. A Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, on top of the competitive Grammys the 1960s had already given the live albums. In 2014 the Academy handed him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He accepted it as a man who had already spent the money, not as a man discovering charity in old age. He kept talking in ways that made Democrats wince — about Iraq, about Barack Obama, about a Black political class he thought had gone quiet. He called George W. Bush the greatest terrorist in the world, a sentence the morning shows ran for a week. He said things about Obama that the same shows treated as a family argument. Allies asked him to soften. He did not. He campaigned for Bernie Sanders in 2016 the way he had campaigned for people the party had not yet decided to love. A complete file holds the 1963 still and the interviews that were not useful to anyone’s campaign. In 2017 he received a governor’s award from the Television Academy, another plaque on a life that had already used television as a picket line.
He died on April 25, 2023, at home in New York, of congestive heart failure. He was ninety-six. Pamela was there. The children were the house. Harlem is the first address. Jamaica is the other. The Mall is the still. The wallet is the life. He had already, in the Workshop and the Birmingham bail and the UNICEF flights, written the public man. The private man was a husband who had outlived most of the rooms and had not made a tour of the surviving.
After he was gone
Every celebrity conscience after him still pays him a tax in actual dollars, not posts. Every seventh-inning “Day-O” still steals a work song. Poitier still arrives in the same sentence, which is the right classroom. The Hersholt is in the clip file. The Carnegie Hall albums still teach a living room what a work chant can do when a serious singer refuses to treat it as a joke. Shari and the household have had to share a father the country reduced to a grin and a dock lyric. The bail receipts are the correction.
He came out of Harlem and Jamaica, acted, sang a boat song into a treasury, bailed out a movement, fought a world that wanted him sweeter, and died still inconvenient. If you only remember “Day-O,” you have the climate. If you remember the Workshop, the bail, and the unhelpful sentence, you have him.
Portrait: Unknown · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons