Harry Belafonte remembered in Hollywood with flowers on his Walk of Fame star
Flowers were placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame star of Harry Belafonte on Tuesday, after it was announced the singer, songwriter and groundbreaking actor died at the age of 96.
Belafonte started his entertainment career belting "Day O" in his 1950s hit song "Banana Boat" before turning to political activism.
On Hollywood Boulevard, fans were full of praise for the star, who died of congestive heart failure at his home in New York on Tuesday with his wife Pamela by his side, the firm of his longtime spokesperson Ken Sunshine said in a statement.
"He used his acting career to be a platform to speak to so many individuals to say, hey, we are here, Black people, we matter. And his acting, his charisma, who he is as a person, it just shines," said Andre Delaine, a 36-year-old Belafonte fan from Ohio.
"He was one of the greatest actors there was. I was a little girl on my father's floor, and grandmother's floor, watching. Just one of the greatest actors there ever will be," added Brigitte Weatherspoon, a 47-year-old Belafonte fan.
As a Black leading man who explored racial themes in 1950s movies, Belafonte would later move on to work with his friend Martin Luther King Jr. during the US civil rights movement in the early 1960s. He became the driving force behind the celebrity-studded, famine-fighting hit song "We Are the World" in the 1980s.
Belafonte was born in New York City's borough of Manhattan but spent his early childhood in his family's native Jamaica. Handsome and suave, he came to be known as the "King of Calypso" early in his career. He was the first Black person allowed to perform in many plush nightspots and also had racial breakthroughs in movies at a time when segregation prevailed in much of the United States.
In "Island in the Sun" in 1954 his character entertained notions of a relationship with a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, which reportedly triggered threats to burn down theatres in the American South. In 1959's "Odds Against Tomorrow," Belafonte played a bank robber with a racist partner.
In the 1960s he campaigned with King, and in the 1980s, he worked to end apartheid in South Africa and coordinated Nelson Mandela's first visit to the United States.
Belafonte travelled the world as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, in 1987 and later started an AIDS foundation. In 2014 he received an Academy Award for his humanitarian work.
Belafonte provided the impetus for "We Are the World," the 1985 all-star musical collaboration that raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia. After seeing a grim news report on the famine, he wanted to do something similar to the fund-raising song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by the British supergroup Band-Aid a year earlier.
Even in his late 80s, Belafonte was still speaking out on race and income equality and urging President Barack Obama to do more to help the poor. He was a co-chair of the Women's March on Washington held the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president in January 2017.
Reuters
