Harry Belafonte, Hollywood, and Movement Politics

Books about the civil rights movement celebrate the achievements of leaders such as Martin L. King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, and Stokely Carmichael but they rarely mention Harry Belafonte—who sat at the table with all of them.  That is because unlike other civil rights activists, Belafonte preferred to remain under the radar.  Keenly aware of his celebrity status, he wanted people to focus on the movement and not the stars supporting it.  A politically sophisticated radical, he understood that the forces of capitalism and racism were far too powerful for any one group to overturn. Consequently, Belafonte worked to build a broad range of coalitions that collectively might succeed in generating radical change.  If Harry Belafonte is less well known to audiences today than his one-time best friend Sidney Poitier, it is because of his politics and not his talent. Movement politics on the Left took many now familiar forms: marches, mass demonstrations, picket lines, sit-ins, voter registration drives, and electoral politics.  Yet Belafonte understood he could also use film, music, television, and concerts as weapons of political change. “There’s a lot more to revolution than burning down the barricades,” he told one reporter, “and major social change is not always achieved by the front line troops.”  He gave up the screen at the height of his career in 1959 and spent the next eleven years as the central Hollywood figure in the civil rights movement. In addition to serving as Martin Luther King Jr.’s liaison with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Belafonte helped organize the Hollywood March on Washington in 1963, mediated between often contentious liberal and Left civil rights groups, promoted Pan Africanism, opposed the Vietnam war, and, as Coretta Scott King remarked, remained one of her husband’s two “most devoted and trusted friends.”