Harry Belafonte: a trader in uncomplicated happiness who became a magnetic civil rights figure

It tells us something about the United States Harry Belafonte first charmed that, in 1957, the South Carolina Legislature introduced a bill to fine any cinema showing Robert Rossen’s film Island in the Sun. The crime? A suggestion of romance between Belafonte’s lead and the character played by white actor Joan Fontaine.

Perhaps more shocking still, 11 years later, deep into the era of the civil mights movement, a scandal erupted when Petula Clark briefly touched Belafonte during a TV special. “To this day, I can’t think of another special that had such an impact on me as far as the emotional drama and trauma,” Rossen later said.

Belafonte, who has died in New York at the age of 96, was one of the most admired and versatile performers of his era. As a singer, he will be remembered for charming, calypso-tinged records such as The Banana Boat Song, Matilda and Jamaica Farewell. His third studio album, unambiguously titled Calypso, became the first LP to sell over a million copies.

Alongside his friend Sidney Poitier, he became among the first black actors to lead Hollywood movies. His chemistry with Dorothy Dandridge in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, from 1954, still crackles on the screen. As the incidents involving Clark and Island in the Sun confirm, resistance against such advances remained trenchant. But Belafonte proved determined.

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Through the 1960s, he became a magnetic, galvanising figure in the Civil Rights movement. His home in Manhattan acted as sanctuary to Martin Luther King, and Belafonte offered financial assistance to the family after King’s murder. He had gained legendary status sometime before middle-age loomed.

Harry Belafonte was born as Harold George Bellanfanti in New York City to working-class Jamaican parents. He spent much of his childhood in the old country, before returning to the US to study at George Washington High School in upper Manhattan and then serve in the navy during the second World War.

Entranced by the American Negro Theater company, he went on to take acting classes opposite such contemporaries as Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. Singing was initially a sideline to pay for those classes, but his clever, silky interpretations of folk tunes soon attracted attention and, with the release of Matilda in 1953, he was propelled inexorably towards stardom.

Even back then some critics were a bit snitty about the digestibility of his take on Calypso music. Purists felt it a little too easy on the ear. Intellectuals were, at the time, still devoted to the post-bebop evolutions of jazz. Rock’n’roll, which landed as Belafonte was breaking through, appealed to more anarchic spirits. But the suave seductions of Belafonte’s style have remained unavoidable over the succeeding decades.

The uninhibited good spirits of Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) won it an enduring popularity that no supposed art-music could ever hope to achieve. “Purism is the best cover-up for mediocrity,” he told the New York Times in 1959. “If there is no change we might just as well go back to the first ‘ugh,’ which must have been the first song.”

Belafonte was simply one of the biggest stars in the world for close to a decade. He could not quite maintain that level of fame in the 1960s. It was Poitier who went on to become the more influential black actor. Younger record buyers were swayed by the less emollient sounds of the Rolling Stones and the zestier beats of Tamla Motown. But Belafonte maintained his status as mentor and inspiration.

Much of that was down to the unstinting weight he put behind the campaign for racial justice. He bankrolled the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. He contributed to the “freedom rides” that challenged resistance to integration. In 1968 that now scarcely believable furore broke out when Clark set her hand on his arm. The English singer made it clear she would not allow the sequence to be cut from the broadcast.

Belafonte, who is survived by his third wife Pamela Frank, remained an inspirational humanitarian throughout his life. He worked with Unicef. He travelled to South Africa to assist the campaign against Aids. By the time, in 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences granted him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award – an Oscar at last – he was perhaps as well-known as an activist as he was as a performer. Yet he was once the most electrifyingly winning of performers. He was a dogged campaigner for controversial causes. He was also a trader in uncomplicated happiness.