Harry Belafonte, folk singer and civil rights activist, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure in his home in Manhattan at 96 years old. Not only was Belafonte a groundbreaking singer, at one point as famous in the U.S. as Elvis Presley, but he used his fame and money to support civil rights movements across the South. Which is how he ended up running from the Ku Klux Klan through Mississippi in the dead of night with renown actor Sidney Poitier at his side.
Belafonte is one of those threads in the American quilt that was so transformative that his presence is felt long after his time as a household name came to an end. Even if you don’t exactly know who Belafonte is, you most likely recognize this tune:
Heck, I bet you learned to sing it in kindergarten! I bet they’re still teaching it to kindergarteners this day. This simple song is based on the call-and-response of dockworkers in Jamaica and appeared on Belafonte’s third album Calypso. In 1956 that album became the first full length album of any type to music to sell more than a million copies. It spent 31 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, the New York Times reports.
Belafonte broke through the extreme whiteness of American culture using songs Black people sang in places like Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and almost single handedly caused an explosion in interest in Caribbean music. He was a true trailblazer both in culture and in civil rights, and used his fame and fortune to protect people pushing for change. Here’s a short list of his work, from the New Yorker:
Belafonte would become integral to the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties, both as an adviser and confidante of King’s and a financial patron, helping to fund voter-registration drives, Freedom Rides, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and more. Over the next fifty years, his activism would extend beyond domestic concerns: he has advocated for famine relief in Africa (he was an organizer of the recording sessions for “We Are the World,” in 1985), H.I.V./aids prevention and treatment, the abolition of nuclear weapons, education, the end of apartheid, and more. Most recently, he served as a co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington, held the day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration.
Civil rights work is never easy, but 1964 was a particularly brutal year. Just a year before, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was shot outside his Mississippi home by white supremacists. Then three civil rights workers, part of Freedom Summer movement, were abducted in Philadelphia, Mississippi, brutally beaten to death and lynched, and left in shallow graves. When the state refused to prosecute those responsible for the crime, the feds stepped in and charged seven men,members of both local law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan, with civil rights violations.
That was the atmosphere of the south in 1964 the night Harry Belafonte asked his long-time friend and fellow cultural juggernaut Sidney Poitier to drive through Mississippi with doctor’s bag full of $70,000 in cash, much of it Belafonte’s own money. The cash would go towards funding the fight for civil rights in the deep south—if they could get it to the civil rights workers before the klan caught them. The Dallas Morning News described the event in detail:
The financial costs of supporting the hundreds of Council of Federated Organizations volunteers spread across the state soon strained the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the breaking point. By August, James Forman, de facto leader of the SNCC, called Belafonte for help. “We’ve got a crisis down here,” they told him.” “We need help.” They needed $50,000, and they needed it right away.
Belafonte personally donated much of the money, organized a quick fundraiser and raised $70,000. The problem then became how to transport that much money into the heart of what was essentially occupied territory. The SNCC and other organizations had already had problems with the white-supremist controlled banks, and wiring that much money to any African American was tantamount to suicide.
Belafonte concocted a desperate plan and contacted Poitier — whom he called “his brother” — and Poitier agreed to accompany him to Mississippi. The two men flew from Newark to Jackson, where they were met by Forman and SNCC volunteer Willie Blue, to deliver the money to Greenwood.
As Belafonte recalls in his autobiography, My Song: A Memoir of Arts, Race and Defiance, “I’d never seen a night as black as this.” Somehow, the Klan and other racist groups found out.
With Poitier and Belafonte in the backseat, Blue left the small airport driving the nondescript car at 40 miles per hour hoping to thwart Highway Patrol cars already hidden along the route — each patrol intent to catch them speeding and take the men to the station where they risked a beating or worse.
Almost immediately, their automobile was attacked by a pickup with two-by-fours mounted on the grill. The truck slammed into them repeatedly, trying to force the small car off the road. The cat-and-mouse game continued for several miles. At the final moment, a hastily convened procession of autos with SNCC volunteers arrived to form an impromptu protective convoy.
It was a nightmarish scene, with Belafonte and Poitier never knowing if the next truck that pulled even with them would point a shotgun out of the passenger-side window. Numerous shots were fired at the cars in the small procession, but none somehow struck Poitier and Belafonte’s vehicle.
The caravan survived the gauntlet and when Poitier and Belafonte, exhausted and bruised, walked into the small Elks Hall in Greenwood, they were met by screams of joy and impromptu freedom songs by the volunteers.
As Belafonte wrote, “Sidney and I had heard a lot of applause in our day, but never anything like those cheers. After weeks of lonely, scary fieldwork, these volunteers were wrung out and in despair. To have two of the biggest Black stars in the world walk in to show solidarity with them – meant a lot of them, and to us.” More freedom songs followed.
The KKK, however, wasn’t about to give up its terrorism of the two men. It like these guys missed Lilies of the Field or something?:
At last Poitier and Belafonte slipped out to a small house nearby where they shared a single double bed that had been shoved under a window. A few armed SNCC members positioned themselves outside. Within minutes, a convoy of idling vehicles, each full of Ku Klux Klan members, filled the streets surrounding the house and remained throughout the long night.
Belafonte said that the two men bantered good-naturedly over who should have the outside of the bed, the furthest from the window. “No, I’ll take the outside,” Poitier said. “If you do get shot, I’d have to have to climb over your dead ass to get to the door.”
Both men would make it out of Mississippi alive and more dedicated than ever to the cause of civil rights. The two would remain close friends until Poitier’s death in 2022. The world is such a better place because Belafonte was in it. Music is better and people are just a little freer. I think that’s the best legacy anyone can leave after 96 years on Earth.