2023-04-25 16:01:07
Slender, elegant, Harry Belafonte has staged African-American beauty, its universality, being himself a pure product of the American cultural mix. Singer, actor, political activist, Harry Belafonte took on, without blushing, after the war, the exotic role of “king of calypso”, a music born at the beginning of the XXe century in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, where he had never set foot. Often double-edged, hedonistic and casual in appearance, the calypso rocked migratory truths on a three-beat rhythm.
Also paragon of the great American variety, Harry Belafonte was the unforgettable Corporal Joe, who fell madly in love with a rebellious worker, in Carmen Jones (1954), by Otto Preminger, the first attempt at passionate diversity in an American cinema still inhabited by the demons of segregation.
A civil rights activist, Harry Belafonte was a friend of Martin Luther King and the despiser of the American right embodied by Richard Nixon, by Ronald Reagan, by the Bush dynasty, or by Donald Trump, whom he tirelessly denounced for his raspy and deep voice, while pointing the finger at the timid fighters of the black cause, from Sidney Poitier to Jay-Z and Beyoncé, to Barack Obama. American icon, Harry Belafonte embodied the enlightened, laughing, educated and polite face of a nation shattered by the violence of which he knew all the springs.
Harold George Bellanfanti Jr., known as Harry Belafonte, was born on the 1is March 1927 in Harlem, the beating heart of black and Caribbean New York. He died on April 25, 2023, at the age of 96, his spokesperson, Ken Sunshine, announced at New York Times. Harry Belafonte has always claimed a lineage marked by “intermarriage”. “If you could see my whole family coming together, you would see all shades of color, from the darkest black, like my Uncle Hyne, to the lightest white, like my Uncle Eric, a Scotsman”he amused himself.
His mother, Melvine, known as Love, a housekeeper, was born in Jamaica, to a Scottish mother and a Jamaican father. Harold George Belafonte Sr., the father, cook in the Royal Navy, was born in Martinique, with Haitian, Jamaican and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Married in 1926, the Bellanfanti parents settled in Harlem, which they left for Jamaica during the Great Depression, before relocating to New York and going their separate ways.
Tails, hidden racism
At the age of 9, Harry was sent back to Jamaica, still under British rule, with his brother Dennis. Their daily life is divided between a boarding school in Kingston and their grandmother’s wooden house on stilts in Aboukir, a mountain village. On the tails, he is the victim of latent racism – because of his dark complexion, he is discriminated against compared to his brother, who is whiter – and then discovers the correlation between skin color and social position.
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