Harry Belafonte comes to Atlanta on Wednesday to read from his new memoir in what might be a bittersweet homecoming for the celebrated and controversial entertainer and activist.
In his early life, the Harlem-born singer developed a close friendship and alliance with Atlanta’s native son, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and played a key role in the civil rights movement.
Yet Belafonte, now 84, lived long enough to fall out of favor with the King family, and in 2006 he was disinvited to Coretta Scott King’s funeral at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia.
The hurt still festers.
“The flaw and the impairment or impediment within that family is beyond the capacity of mere mortals to heal,” Belafonte said in a telephone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week.
These are among the sharp and poignant details covered in “My Song,” which chronicles the singer’s rise from the streets of New York and the hills of Jamaica, to the political activism that defined his life.
The book is a long look in a rearview mirror at a career that spanned more than 50 years, then a sharp glance forward at what lies ahead.
Belafonte’s voice is like gravel now, rutted in spaces. But that voice was smooth, easy, with only a whisper of huskiness around the edges when he made a splash on the music scene in the mid-1950s. His album of Caribbean folk songs, “Calypso,” was the first album to sell a million copies. That voice and his good looks helped him become a matinee idol.
Born to Jamaican parents, his plan was to become an accomplished stage actor. He went to theater school with some of the best, including Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Bea Arthur and Walter Matthau.
Credit: AJC Special
Credit: AJC Special
But a chance turn singing in a small school production lead him to music and soon he was singing jazz standards with Charlie Parker and Max Roach. Where he came into his own, however, was when he adopted folk music. For him it was music of protest. It didn’t hurt that he could pack concert halls singing them.
That he was good looking, could sing and act, eventually led him to Hollywood, where he became one of the two black male actors (the other being Sidney Poitier) whom studio executives would actually cast in a lead role.
By age 42 Belafonte had become not simply a Tony, Grammy and Emmy award winner, he’d become the toast of Las Vegas. All enviable achievements.
But by that time Belafonte had also become a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who’d helped launch his work in foreign relations. He’d been mentored by the legendary singer and activist Paul Robeson, who helped shape his world view as a leftist. Dinners with the top intellectuals and writers of the day, including W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, helped refine his politics. Brando, Frank Sinatra, Poitier and Paul Newman were part of his circle.
And his star was rising at the same time the civil rights movement was gathering momentum. It was through the urging of his mother that the activist soul of Belafonte blossomed. It was she who taught him to stand for a cause and fight, he said.
This is what led a young Martin Luther King Jr. to first seek him out, because King knew Belafonte had been a staunch supporter of unions and workers’ rights to organize. He also knew that as a black entertainer in that era, even someone of Belafonte’s stature and relative privilege had experienced Jim Crow-style discrimination, said Fred Gray, a Tuskegee, Ala., attorney who helped draft King as the public head of the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott.
“It was a movement that affected all people involved — and particularly people who had made it — because they knew what it was to be discriminated against as they tried to rise and gain fame,” Gray said.
Credit: Raymond Hagans / AJC Special
Credit: Raymond Hagans / AJC Special
From a meeting in a New York church basement sprouted a friendship between King and Belafonte that would indelibly shape the rest of the entertainer’s life.
“If you command that much visibility, what do you want to be saying?” asked Belafonte. “Do you want it just to be the song you sing and hear that [song] until it is redundant and smothering, or do you want to say something that might enhance the cause of human development?”
Belafonte quickly became a key part of King’s circle, if not his family. He was a conduit between President John F. Kennedy, his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the top leadership of the civil rights movement.
And the Kennedys often called on Belafonte when they needed to hash out agreements with King and his lieutenants.
For example, when King was jailed in Birmingham after thousands of children were jailed and beaten for marching for civil rights, Belafonte helped coordinate the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to post bail for King and the children. And when King was arrested in Atlanta for a protest at the old Rich’s department store in 1960, Belafonte was part of the team that put pressure on the Kennedys to help get King released.
So close was Belafonte to the King family that he was one of three executors of King’s estate after King’s assassination.
“I’m sure [Belafonte] didn’t cover all the good he did in the book,” said Xernona Clayton, longtime assistant of Coretta Scott King and current president of the Trumpet awards. “I remember it because I was there. He was constant and he was consistent in his financial support as well as his presence.”
Besides paying for the King family to have household help at the height of the movement, Belafonte gave a significant amount of his personal fortune to finance aspects of the movement.
Clayton said that years after King’s assassination Belafonte was still paying for a housekeeping service for Coretta Scott King. Even into the early 2000s he was a donor to the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
Credit: Raymond Hagans / AJC Special
Credit: Raymond Hagans / AJC Special
Had he not given so much he might be a wealthier man, if not a bigger star, Belafonte mused. But does he have regrets?
“I would not have traded anything I did for anything that might have been given to me in its place,” Belafonte said. “More money would not have given me Dr. King. It wouldn’t have given me the life that I had.”
Even now, he tilts hard to the left, unapologetically so. His criticisms of former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell were sharp. He has said on more than one occasion that he’s disappointed in key aspects of President Barack Obama’s performance, particularly with regard to the poor. (Ironically, he was a key sponsor of a program funded in part by the Kennedy family foundation for African students to study in the United States, a program that helped bring Barack Obama Sr. to this country).
That he has embraced dictators Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez put Belafonte at odds with several presidential administrations. Whereas the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks said she was ashamed of George W. Bush as president, Belafonte (while in Venezuela) called the 43rd president a tyrant and a terrorist.
He couldn’t care less what that administration thought of him. But he is convinced that the sentiment he expressed is what caused him one of his greatest pains: being disinvited from the funeral of Coretta Scott King. Bush attended, Belafonte did not and the slight has never been forgotten, perhaps not forgiven.
He doubts he’ll see or talk to any of the King children while in Atlanta, and he remains bitter about his falling out with the family.
“I’ve reached out to the King children with as much dignity and with as much resolve as I could possibly reach out to them,” Belafonte said. “The rage that exists in the hearts of those children and the vengeance they feel they have to wrought on society because there should be a collective guilt about what happened to their father and their mother is beyond the capacity for reason.”
He is, however, looking forward to the possibility of meeting with Occupy Atlanta protesters. Already some of his old colleagues, such as the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have begun advising them. For weeks now Belafonte has been a supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, going to rallies there, bringing food and blankets.
“They are following exactly what happened in Tunisia and in Cairo and nobody can dismiss the fact that there is a universal connectedness to all of this,” Belafonte said. “I don’t think history could have given us a better turn than the turn we’re experiencing right at this moment.”
Being a part of it is another cycle in his evolution as an activist, a role that endures in this final act of his life.
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