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Harry Belafonte died Tuesday at his Upper West Side home. He was 96, which is an advanced age even for the US Senate. He’d lived a full, rich life and leaves behind more than just the “Banana Boat” song, known around the world simply as “Day-O.”
Still, it’s a great song and inspired one of my favorite scenes in cinema. Catherine O’Hara as a possessed Delia Deetz gives good calypso.
During the height of segregation, at a time when Black faces simply weren’t allowed in the mainstream, Belafonte enjoyed tremendous success as a performer. Belafonte was born in Harlem, but his parents were West Indian. He perhaps is solely responsible for popularizing Caribbean music in the states. He was bigger than Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and his third album Calypso, which included “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell,” sold more than a million copies in 1956, the same year Elvis Presley hit the scene. By the end of the decade, he was the most highly paid Black performer in the country, with lucrative contracts in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York. He even had some limited success as a movie actor. (That’s Belafonte with Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, not Sidney Poitier.)
Yet, he was willing to risk it all for what he believed. He was a passionate supporter of civil rights and inevitably ended up on Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist. Nonetheless, he helped Dr. Martin Luther King’s family financially. He bailed Dr. King out of jail in 1963 and raised money to release other civil rights protesters. He bankrolled the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He contributed to the 1961 Freedom Rides and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. He remarked that Paul Robeson had given him his “backbone” but Dr. King had nourished his soul.
When Belafonte appeared on Petula Clark’s 1968 NBC primetime TV special, his black arm was briefly touched by the singer’s white hand. This freaked out Doyle Lott, the advertising manager for the show’s sponsor Plymouth Motors. Lott demanded that they retape the segment with no interracial limb linkage. However, Clark owned the special and told NBC that the performance would either air intact or not at all. The period’s Matt Walsh and Megyn Kelly might’ve decried her “wokeness” and assault on what was then considered “traditional” (white) values, but Clark held firm and the special aired with full frontal arm touchage. Lott lost his job because of the controversy. Donald Trump would’ve invited Lott to the White House.
The following year, NBC aired “An Evening with Julie Andrews and Harry Belafonte” where the two amazing singers straight up had sex on stage as Lott shook his fist at the TV and shouted, “I warned you!” No, seriously, nothing like that happened, but the sexual chemistry is kind of off the charts. I’m also not sure if it was legal in 1969 for a white woman to have her shoes off so close to a Black man, but Andrews was feeling more than a little groovy.
Belafonte remained militant even as he mostly retired from performing. He was an unapologetic critic of US foreign policy and was active in the anti-apartheid movement. He drew criticism in 2002 when he criticized Black Republicans Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for serving in the George W. Bush administration. Alluding to Malcolm X, Belafonte said:
There is an old saying, in the days of slavery. There were those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master, do exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. That gave you privilege. Colin Powell is committed to come into the house of the master, as long as he would serve the master, according to the master’s purpose. And when Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture. And you don’t hear much from those who live in the pasture.
Considering Powell’s fate after the Iraq disaster as his party went full MAGA, these words are chillingly prescient.
Recently, Belafonte had advocated against childhood incarceration and the over-policing of Black children in schools. After five-year-old Jaiesha Scott was handcuffed and arrested in her Florida classroom for “unruly” behavior, Belafonte founded The Gathering for Justice in 2005. The sight of this Black girl denied her childhood struck Belafonte with how, despite so many gains achieved during the Civil Rights movement, there was still a long road ahead. Belafonte never wavered from that road, and even in death, his life serves as an inspiration for those who remain and follow his example.
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