Harry Belafonte, a musician, actor, and indefatigable campaigner, passes away at age 96 from congestive heart failure.
He was a top-charting calypso singer and backed the US civil rights struggle and African projects.
The actor, singer, and activist Harry Belafonte passed away at the age of 96. Congestive heart failure was the death’s underlying cause.
Belafonte spent his life advocating for several causes in addition to singing international songs like Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), receiving a Tony Award for acting, and appearing in numerous feature films.
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He backed several civil rights movements for Black Americans in the 1960s, ran anti-poverty, anti-apartheid, and anti-AIDS campaigns in Africa, and supported leftist politicians like Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
Belafonte was born in working-class Harlem, New York, in 1927. He spent his early years in his parents’ poor homeland Jamaica for eight years.
He went back to New York to finish high school, but due to dyslexia, he left in his early adolescence. He did odd jobs in marketplaces and the city’s garment area until enlisting in the US military in March 1944 at the age of 17 and beginning work as a weapons loader at a base in New Jersey.
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