Martin Belafonte: A New York City Activist, Political Leader, Civil Rights Advocate, and Cosmic Favorite
He wrote that the more he threw himself into political organizing the brighter his acting prospects looked. Similar organizing took the forms of marches, protests, and rallies. There is money. He helped underwrite the civil rights movement, paying for freedom rides. He kept a life insurance policy on Dr. King because he did not believe he could afford it. The building he bought at 300 West End Avenue in Manhattan and converted into a 21-room palace seemed to double as the movement’s New York headquarters. (“Martin began drafting his antiwar speech in my apartment.”) The psychic center and administrative center of the movement is near the center of it all.
(Nonetheless, in 2013 he sued Dr. King’s three surviving children in a dispute over documents that Mr. Belafonte said were his property and that the children said belonged to the King estate. The suit was settled in the next year.
In the immediate aftermath of Dr. King’s death, Mr. Belafonte expressed ambivalence about his high profile in the civil rights movement. He would like to “be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people,” he said, adding, “I hate marching, and getting called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats out of jail.” But, he said, he accepted his role.
In the same interview, he noted ruefully that although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. He was more upset by the racism that he was confronted with even at the height of his fame.
His role in the 1957 movie “Island in the Sun,” which contained the suggestion of a romance between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, generated outrage in the South; a bill was even introduced in the South Carolina Legislature that would have fined any theater showing the film. In Atlanta for a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1962, Mr. Belafonte was twice refused service in the same restaurant. Petula Clark, a white female singer, had angered many viewers and her appearance on TV cost her a sponsor.
It began with the folk music. In it varied guises wed acoustic singing and Black spiritual arrangements with the sounds of the islands. He had a million-selling album, and took it on the road for white audiences who would pay a lot of money to watch him perform. And rather than simply translate his hot-ticket cabaret act for American living rooms, Belafonte imagined something stranger and more alluring. In 1959, he got CBS to broadcast an hourlong studio performance by himself, which began with a live commercial for Revlon and ended with a scene featuring black men and a blond actress.
They are pantomiming hard labor while singing a version of the famous song. The whole hour is just this sort of chilling: percussive work songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, dramatically spare sets that imply segregation and incarceration, the weather system that called herself Odetta. He never makes a direct speech about injustice. He trusts the songs and stagecraft to speak for themselves. Folks — Black folks, especially — will get it. It’s their music.