The World Pays Tribute to Singer, Actor, and Activist and Harry Belafonte 

Harry Belafonte—the chart-topping Jamaican-American singer, actor, and activist—has died at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, according to spokesman Ken Sunshine. At 96, the Carmen Jones leading man was one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, to say nothing of his long legacy as a tireless civil rights advocate. (In March, Variety reported that Following Harry, a new documentary chronicling Belafonte’s ongoing social justice work, was being “readied for premiere at fall film festivals.”)

Belafonte was born in Harlem and raised for a time in his parents’ native Jamaica before returning to the United States and serving in the Navy during World War II. After his discharge, he became involved with the American Negro Theater, where he both performed and worked as a stagehand, soon befriending the late Sidney Poitier. Yet it was Belafonte’s career in music—first as a jazz act, later as a folk and calypso artist—that took off first after he signed to RCA Victor in 1953; three years later, his breakout album Calypso would become the first LP to sell a million copies within a year, spending 31 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts. Belafonte subsequently won an Emmy for the TV special Revlon Revue: Tonight with Belafonte (1959) and performed at the inaugural gala for President John F. Kennedy. (Among other accolades, he also received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1989, the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys in 2000.)

Belafonte’s film career was somewhat slower going. After making his debut in the 1953 musical-drama Bright Road, starring Dorothy Dandridge, the two re-teamed for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones in 1954. Vogue featured Belafonte on its “People Are Talking About” spread in December of that year, describing him as “a tall, relaxed young man with long delicate bones, golden-brown skin, and a voice like a strummed guitar, warm and resonant; at twenty-eight, an unflustered success in the movies (Carmen Jones), in night clubs, TV, and on records.” He would go on to appear in 1957’s Island in the Sun and 1959’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil, but in the 1960s, he shifted his focus to music and especially to activism, bailing his friend Martin Luther King Jr. out of Birmingham City Jail in 1963 and funding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s efforts to enroll Black voters in Mississippi in 1964. In later years, he would also raise money and awareness for communities in Africa, helping to organize the 1985 recording of “We Are the World,” leading a cultural boycott against South Africa, and serving as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, among other humanitarian efforts. 

After the news of Belafonte’s death broke on Tuesday, figures from entertainment, politics, media, and beyond took to Twitter to share tributes: