Don't ever let injustice go by unchallenged," his mother told him.

 “Don't ever let injustice go by unchallenged," his mother told him.

He was a rebel, a self-described “angry misfit”. He and a friend would survive an ambush by KKK members who tried to force their vehicle off the road.

Born in Manhattan on March 1, 1927, and raised in Depression-era Harlem, he said he spent his life “in a constant state of rebellion.”

“His parents were mixed-race undocumented immigrants who constantly changed jobs, apartments and even their names to avoid authorities,” wrote Andrew R. Chow in Time Magazine. 

“Throughout my childhood we lived an underground life, as criminals of a sort, on the run,” [he would] write in his 2011 memoir.

Life for him as a child “was rife with hardship and sorrow, . . . His alcoholic father beat him bloody; his schoolyard years were full of fights waged with “bottles, garbage cans, rocks, hands and feet.

” When he was a toddler, he accidentally cut himself in the eye with scissors, blinding himself in one eye for the rest of his life. 

[He] was also dyslexic, and his poor eyesight led him to drop out of school in the ninth grade, leaving him few career prospects.”

Poverty “defined” him, he wrote in his memoir.

“A day after his 17th birthday, he enlisted in the Navy and soon was disabused of romantic notions of military fellowship,” wrote Adam Bernstein  of The Washington Post.

 “Minor infractions landed him for two weeks at the Naval Prison in Portsmouth, Va., where he saw German POWs receiving better treatment.

“The injustice of this sickened me,” he wrote, adding that the experience “radicalized” him politically.

“Despite his service he was often turned away from segregated restaurants or concert venues.”

“The all-too-frequent incidents of prejudice kept me in an almost constant state of simmering rage,” he wrote.

When he returned, he found work as a janitor in a Harlem apartment building. A grateful tenant gave him tickets to the American Negro Theatre, where he started connecting with like-minded people. One of those, another janitor at the theater, became a life-long friend

While looking for an acting job, he and his newlywed wife lived on her teacher’s salary in a $55-a-month apartment.

“In the meantime, he found a mentor in the African American entertainer Paul Robeson, a leading activist for civil and union rights who was hounded by federal authorities for his alleged socialist sympathies,” wrote Bernstein. Urged by Robeson, [he] began using folk songs to decry racism, poverty and other social ills.”

“In 1956, [he] decided to record an entire album of Caribbean island songs, much to the chagrin of his label, RCA, who felt it would be too “ethnic,” according to Chow. 

But [his album] was a runaway success: It made history as the first album to sell a million copies in the U.S., and embarked on a 99-week Billboard chart run that wouldn’t be matched until Michael Jackson’s Thriller more than a quarter-century later.”

Wrote Joshua Jelly-Schapiro of New York Magazine:

“In 1956, a Harlem-bred child of Caribbean immigrants [became] bigger than Elvis. But where Elvis built Graceland, [he] used the proceeds from [his album]” to assist a young Martin Luther King Jr

 and his movement for civil rights. Along with his friend, the former janitor, Sidney Poitier, they became outspoken voices for justice and racial equality.

This Harlem-bred child of undocumented immigrants was born as Harold George Belanfanti Jr., but his parents had Americanized his name. 

Harry Belafonte smashed “a series of barriers during five decades as a movie, TV and stage star, “ wrote Bernstein. “His artistic and humanitarian work frequently overlapped, reflecting his belief that ‘the role of art isn’t just to show life as it is but to show life as it should be.’”

He became “a dynamic force in the civil rights movement,” according to the New Yor Times.

This is a new story from the Jon S. Randal Peace page to honor the life and achievements of Harry Belafonte, who died of congestive heart failure Tuesday, April 25, at the age 96 at his New York home, according to his longtime spokesman.

The Peace Page focuses on past and present stories—some seldom told, others simply forgotten, still others intentionally ignored. 

The stories and chapters are gathered from writers, journalists, and historians to share awareness and foster understanding—to bring people together—and, as such, they are available all year in the Peace Page archives with new stories appearing each week throughout the year. 

We encourage you to learn more about the individuals and events mentioned here and to acknowledge the writers, educators, and historians whose words we present. Thank you for being here and helping us share awareness.

Growing up, Belafonte would refer to “my people” as “gangsters”, but clarified that by saying, “I don’t mean major American crime; I mean, as an immigrant, if you can’t find work inside the law, you find work outside the law. Running numbers and so on.

 Which is, of course, a characteristic of the poor, who find ways to break the rules, since the rules are always stacked against them.”

When he joined the Navy in 1944, he was hoping for adventure and glory on the Eastern front of World War II.

 “But the armed forces were still segregated, with African Americans often relegated to dangerous grunt work like handling live ammunition.

When he “later enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research,” his classmates included “Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Rod Steiger and Tony Curtis,” according to writer Drew Weisholtz.

When he released his history-making album “Calypso,” he said “It’s a song about my father, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica.”

"The song is a work song," he said. "It's about men who sweat all day long, and they are underpaid. They're begging for the tallyman to come and give them an honest count: 'Count the bananas that I've picked so I can be paid.' 

When people sing in delight and dance and love it, they don't really understand unless they study the song — that they're singing a work song that's a song of rebellion."

"When people thought he was just singing about good times in the islands, he was always like infusing messages of protest and revolution in everything he did," John Legend said. 

“There had never before been any singer that popular with White middle-class audiences as well as Black audiences,” the cultural critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said in an interview. “In that sense, he was an agent of change, the musical voice of civil rights.”

“Using music to espouse universal brotherhood, Mr. Belafonte encouraged audiences to sing along to calypso, protest and chain-gang songs, the ballad ‘Danny Boy’ and the Hebrew folk song ‘Hava Nagila’, according to The Washington Post.

“A two-time Grammy Award winner, Belafonte also won a Tony Award for best actor in a featured role in a musical for ‘John Murray Anderson’s Almanac’ in 1954,” according to Weisholtz.

“The first Black producer in television, he also won an Emmy Award in 1960 for his special ‘Tonight with Belafonte.

’ In 2015, he was recognized with a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars, giving him coveted EGOT status.”

Despite his popularity, Belafonte “still met with plenty of resistance, especially as he entered previously segregated spaces,” wrote Chow.

 “While walking up Coldwater Canyon while filming his first Hollywood role, Bright Road, he was arrested and charged with illegal loitering.

 In Las Vegas, he was turned away from the resort he was playing at and instead told to stay at a dingy colored motel across town. A Chicago club’s manager initially refused to let him into his own show.”

In one famous incident, “Mr. Belafonte and White British singer Petula Clark were performing a duet of the antiwar song ‘Paths of Glory’ on an NBC special,” according to Bernstein.

 “An advertising manager for the automaker Chrysler-Plymouth, which was sponsoring the show, objected when Clark spontaneously touched Mr. Belafonte’s arm.

“The executive, who interrupted the song and had called for a retake, was later reprimanded by Chrysler and called Mr. Belafonte to apologize.

 ‘Your apology comes 100 years too late,’ the singer replied. NBC kept the scene when the show was televised. 

Mr. Belafonte later told an interviewer, “It is essential to television and industries to know that people like [this] exist. I’m tired and frustrated by what I’ve had to go through in this medium.

“At the height of his mainstream fame, Belafonte stepped back from entertainment to devote the bulk of his time to the burgeonng Civil Rights Movement,” according to Time Magazine.

 “He became a key economic engine and behind-the-scenes organizer for many of the sit-ins, freedom rides and marches that would sweep the South and propel social and federal change.”

“He became one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most trusted confidants, serving as a mediator between King and John F. Kennedy’s White House; he stood at the front lines at the March on Washington and the final march from Selma to Montgomery.”

“Belafonte’s global popularity and his commitment to our cause is a key ingredient to the global struggle for freedom and a powerful tactical weapon in the civil rights movement here in America. We are blessed by his courage and moral integrity,” King once said.

“In the immediate wake of the Birmingham protests in 1963, when thousands of children were jailed by Bull Connor’s police forces, [Belafonte] raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and worked closely with King, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and union leaders to bail scores of children out of jail,” wrote Chow.

“He also brought Brando, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman and Tony Bennett to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech — a critical show of White support that made King’s address all the more universal in its appeal,” according to the Washington Post.

And, he “used his friendships with Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Lena Horne and Henry Fonda to raise more than $100,000 to fund the Freedom Rides in 1964 that challenged racial segregation in interstate transportation.”

This was the time he and Poitier sped down the highway as a pursuing group of the Ku Klux Klan fired gunshots at them.

“Whenever we got into trouble or when tragedy struck, Harry has always come to our aid, his generous heart wide open,” Coretta Scott King wrote of Belafonte in her autobiography.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Bernice King remembers, "When I was a child, Harry Belafonte showed up for my family in very compassionate ways. In fact, he paid for the babysitter for me and my siblings . . . I won’t forget.”

“­Belafonte also persuaded JFK to approve airlifting a planeload of Kenyan students to America in 1961,” according to Joshua Jelly-Schapiro of New York Magazine.

Belafonte remembered, “We had the airlift, right. Myself, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a woman called Cora Weiss.

 And we brought Kenyan students, before independence . . . we got them visas to enter American universities. And one of our lifts—and we didn’t have many—on one of those planes, we had Barack Obama’s father.”

“In the decades to come he would expand his empathetic push to a global scale, fighting against apartheid in South Africa, famine in Ethiopia, and genocide in Rwanda,” wrote Chow. “He became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador . . .  and railed fiercely against the Iraq War.”

He “was also one of the driving forces behind ‘We Are the World,’ the star-studded charity single that raised more than $60 million for Ethiopian famine relief after its 1985 release,” according to Larry McShane and Peter Sblendorio of the New York Daily News. 

“He appeared in the video with an assortment of fellow musical legends, including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan.”

And, speaking of Dylan, “during the recording of his 1962 album ‘Midnight Special,’ Belafonte brought in a recently-transplanted Minnesota musician to play harmonica. The young man, named Bob Dylan, made his recording debut playing on the title track.”

“At pivotal moments, he was one of the most critical supporters of the civil rights movement,” said Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian. “Harry was a strong force for keeping people on an even keel.”

“After King’s assassination in 1968, Mr. Belafonte became a roving humanitarian without portfolio,” wrote Bernstein. “He helped start TransAfrica, a lobbying group that pressed for economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime. 

 He lobbied for the release of Nelson Mandela and then helped coordinate the future South African president’s first visit to the United States after his liberation in 1990.”

“Belafonte also created the Gathering For Justice in 2005 to stop child incarceration and put an end to racial inequity in the justice system,” wrote Weishon.

“There was never a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry,” Bob Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir.

“He could play to a packed house at Carnegie Hall one night and then the next day he might appear at a garment center union rally,” Dylan wrote. “To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re part of the human race.”

“You know,” Dylan added, “he never took the easy path, though he could have.”

“I wasn’t an artist who became an activist,” Belafonte reflected on his 90th birthday. “I was an activist who became an artist.”

Harry Belafonte was an activist into his 90s. He told NPR in 2011 that was something he learned from his mother.

"She was tenacious about her dignity not being crushed. And one day, she said to me — she was talking about coming back from a day when she couldn't find work. Fighting back tears, she said, 'Don't ever let injustice go by unchallenged.'"

"Harry Belafonte, a Trailblazer and Hero to us all," said Oprah Winfrey. "Thank you for your music, your artistry, your activism, your fight for civil rights and justice—especially risking your life back in the day to get money to the movement. Your being here on Earth has Blessed us all."

He once said, “I’ve always looked at the world and thought, ‘What can I do next? Where do we go from here? How can we fix it?’”

“And that’s still how I look at the world, because there is so much to be done.”