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Harry Belafonte Knows a Thing or Two About New York [1]

['John Leland']

Date: 2017-02-03

Harry Belafonte’s New York was a lot like yours and mine. He was born in Harlem, got his first singing gig through Lester Young, his first acting role in a company with Sidney Poitier and his first lessons in a class with Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch and Tony Curtis. He met the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a Harlem church basement through Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and met W. E. B. Du Bois through Paul Robeson; his uncle Lenny, who ran a numbers racket, introduced him to the elite of Harlem’s gangsters. He took Nelson Mandela to Yankee Stadium, planned an Amos and Andy movie with Robert Altman and, at 89, he was a co-chairman of the Women’s March on Washington last month, along with Gloria Steinem, though his health kept him from the event.

Mr. Belafonte could tell you a thing or two about New York.

He has been the best-selling singer in America and a pillar in the civil rights movement. But these days, he is anxious about the movement he helped build and about his role in the new era.

“When I took up with Martin,” he said, “I really thought, two, at best three years, this should be over. Fifty years later, he’s dead and gone, and the Supreme Court just reversed the voting rights, and the police are shooting us down dead in the streets. And I look at this horizon of destruction, and I watch the black community by our state of being mute — we have no movement. I don’t know where to go to find the next Robeson. Maybe I don’t deserve a next one. Takes a lot of courage and a lot of power to step into the space and lead a holy war.”

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/nyregion/harry-belafonte.html

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