RIP Funeral of Legend Harry Belafonte, activist and entertainer | All Done
After a long battle with illness, singer-actor-activist Harry Belafonte has passed away.

Belafonte's acting and singing career paved the way for him to find his true singing voice. His notoriety served as a vehicle for social reform.

The success of his song "Banana Boat" launched him into celebrity.

The 1956 album "Calypso" is preserved in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Belafonte, who spent his childhood in Jamaica, sung about the hardships endured by workers there. In an interview with News from 2018, he revealed how meaningful the song was to him.
"Most of my family in the Caribbean, in Jamaica, were plantation workers," he said to Vladimir Duthiers. Singing played a significant role in daily life. It was a welcome relief from the heat and monotony of outdoor labor.

During the time of segregation, Belafonte was the first black recording artist to sell over a million albums thanks to his silky baritone voice.

Belafonte was raised on 114th Street after being born in Harlem in 1927. During World War II, he was a member of the U.S. Navy. He served in the military and then found work as a janitor's helper in New York City.
Two tickets to the American Negro Theater, located in Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, had been gifted to him by a renter. His entire existence would shift because of this.

"I looked and saw players on the stage in the basement of a library in Harlem saying and doing things that just absolutely overwhelmed me," he recalled. To quote one reviewer: "Young artists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were two of the performers that I saw."
In time, Belafonte and Sidney Poitier would become inseparable pals. According to Belafonte, it was his time spent in the theater that gave him direction in life.

My first career wasn't in the arts; it was in activism. However, "I found a place where my activism could be nourished by looking at the world of art and what I discovered in this theater," Belafonte explained.
In 1953, he made his Broadway debut in "John Murray Anderson's Almanac," for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.

In the same year, Belafonte made his film debut in "Bright Road," starring alongside Dorothy Dandridge. Both actors reprised their roles the following year in "Carmen Jones."

Both the Grammy for Best Folk Performance and the primetime Emmy for Outstanding Performance in a Variety Series were awarded to the performer in 1960. Belafonte's career was only beginning.

However, there were also difficult periods. During the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted for being a communist. His first marriage to Marguerite Byrd was strained, he added, because of the allegations. After nine years of marriage, they split up, and in 1957 he wed dancer Julie Robinson.

But he would leave a legacy of art and action. He was a personal friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and gave a speech during the March on Washington in 1963.
Belafonte always spoke with conviction about the need for universal justice, whether he was addressing a politician or the Pope.

For his activism, Belafonte received a Goodwill Ambassador position with the United Nations Children's Fund in 1987 and an honorary Academy Award in 2014.

In 2017, the New York Public Library's 115th Street location was renamed in his honor.

I've done a lot of things in my life, but this event means more to me than most of you probably realize, Belafonte added.

It wasn't until 2018 that we saw Belafonte on the big screen again, in Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman."
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