Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose widespread success paved the way for other black artists in the 1950s, died Tuesday at 96.
A child of Harlem, Mr. Belafonte used his platform at the top of the entertainment world to speak frequently about his music, how black life was portrayed on screen and, most important to him, the civil rights movement. Here are some of the insights Mr. Belafonte provided to The New York Times during his many decades in the public eye, as they appeared at the time:
His music
Mr. Belafonte’s string of hits, including ”Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and ”Jamaica Farewell,” helped create an American obsession with Caribbean music that led his record company to tout him as ”The King of Calypso “.
But Mr. Belafonte has never accepted that kind of monarchical title, dismissing “purism” as “a cover for mediocrity” and explaining that he sees his work as a mix of musical styles.
He told The New York Times magazine in 1959 that folk music “hid within itself a great dramatic sense and a powerful lyrical sense.” He also clearly admitted, “I don’t have a great voice.”
In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some idea of what might be going on globally, from what I’ve been through.” .
He said O-Day, for example, is a way of life.
“This is a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said. “It’s a classic work song.”
His views on cinema and television
Mr. Belafonte’s success in music helped make him a leading man in Hollywood. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier were given more substantial and nuanced roles than black actors had previously been given.
Still, Mr. Belafonte remained largely unsatisfied.
Writing for The Times in 1968, he lamented that “the real beauty, the soul, the integrity of the black community is seldom reflected” on television.
“The environment is dominated by concepts of white supremacy and racist attitudes,” he wrote. “Television excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions, and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither the networks nor the sponsors want that.
Mr. Belafonte stressed that his 10-year-old son had seen few black characters on television.
“The nobility of his heritage and the values that could complement his positive growth and sense of manhood are denied him,” he wrote. “Instead, everything is there to crush him and give him an inferiority complex.” He will see the Negro only as a rebel and a social problem, never as a whole human being.
Some 25 years later, Mr. Belafonte was coy, suggesting in an interview with The Times that little had changed.
“Even today, on the big screen, the pictures that are always successful are pictures in which black people appear the way white America buys it,” he said in 1993. “And we’re told that what we really want to express, it’s not profitable and it’s not commercially viable.’
His politics and activism
Even when Mr. Belafonte was in the prime of his entertainment career, he was focused on activism and civil rights.
”Back in 1959,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in 1981, ”I believed fully in the civil rights movement. I had a personal commitment to it and achieved personal breakthroughs – I produced the first dedicated black television; I was the first black person to star at the Waldorf Astoria. I felt that if we could just turn the nation around, things would fall into place.”
But Mr. Belafonte complained that by the mid-1970s the movement was over.
“When the doors of Hollywood closed to minorities and blacks in the late 1970s,” he said, “many black artists enjoyed exploitation for 10 years. But one day they found that the shop was closed.
Mr. Belafonte remained outspoken about politics in his later years. In 2002, he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “enter the master’s house”; he called President George W. Bush a “terrorist” in 2006 and complained in 2012 that modern celebrities have “turned their backs on social responsibility.”
“There is no evidence that artists have the same passion and the same kind of commitment as artists of my time,” he told The Times in 2016. “The absence of black artists is felt very strongly because the most visible oppression is in black community.”
In 2016 and again in 2020, he took to the opinion pages of The Times to urge voters to reject Donald J. Trump.
“Voting is perhaps the most important weapon in our arsenal,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in a 2016 article. “The same things needed now are the same things needed before,” he added. “Movements don’t die because the struggle doesn’t. “