EGOT holder and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte has died. The singer who was born to Jamaican parents in Harlem New York died at home from congestive heart failure in his Manhattan Home according to his spokesman Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.
Belafonte rose to fame during a time of race turbulence in America and used his fame which he got from being a stellar musician and actor to champion the cause of black people. He is noted for being the biggest fundraiser for Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights right and loaned his voice and celebrity to the apartheid fight in South African, causes in Haiti and other parts of the world.
He put up his own money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for that organization and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
It was a scholarship program organized by Belafonte that Kenyan student Barack Obama Sr. got in the 1960s to study in America where he met former President of the US Barack Obama’s mother.
Harry was the first artist to sell one million albums in the history of the recording industry with the titled “Calypso.”
His special “Tonight With Belafonte” won an Emmy in 1960 (a first for a Black performer), but a deal to do five more specials for that show’s sponsor, the cosmetics company Revlon, fell apart after one more was broadcast; according to Mr. Belafonte, Revlon asked him not to feature Black and white performers together. The taping of a 1968 special with Petula Clark was interrupted when Ms. Clark touched Mr. Belafonte’s arm, and a representative of the sponsor, Chrysler-Plymouth, demanded a retake. (The producer refused, and the sponsor’s representative later apologized, although Mr. Belafonte said the apology came “one hundred years too late.”)
