He gave money to bail Dr. King and other civil rights activists from prison. He participated in the March on Washington in 1963. His spacious apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan became the home of Dr. King away from home. And he quietly held a life insurance policy on Dr. King, with the King family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to ensure that the family was taken care of after Dr. was killed. King in 1968.
(However, 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 lawsuit settled the following year, with Mr. Belafonte retaining ownership.)
In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after the death of Dr. King, Mr. Belafonte expressed dispassion about his high profile in the civil rights movement. He wants to “stop answering questions as if I’m a spokesperson for my people,” he said, adding, “I don’t want to march, and be called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats from prison.” But he said, he accepted his role.
The Challenge of Racism
In the same interview, he lamented that although he sings music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans are white. As frustrating as it may have been, he was even more outraged by the racism he faced even at the height of his fame.
His role in the 1957 film “Island in the Sun,” which contained the suggestion of a romance between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, created outrage in the South; a bill was even introduced in the South Carolina Legislature that would fine any theater showing the film. In Atlanta for a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1962, Mr. Belafonte was refused service twice at the same restaurant. Television appearances with white female singers – Petula Clark in 1968, Julie Andrews in 1969 – angered many viewers and, in the case of Ms. Clark, threatened to cost him a sponsor.
He sometimes criticized Black people, including suggesting early in his career that he owed his success to the lightness of his skin (his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were white). When he divorced his wife in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, who was the only white member of Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe, The Amsterdam News wrote, “Many Negroes wondered why a man waving a flag of justice for his race must turn away. from a Negro wife to a white wife.”
