Harry Belafonte

Trivia

• Appeared in the 1946 American Negro Theatre play "Days of Our Youth" in 1946. Sidney Poitier eventually replaced Harry and was spotted by a talent agent who ignited his Hollywood career.
• He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 6721 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood,California.
• In 1985, he was one of the organizers behind the Grammy Award winning song "We Are the World," a multi-artist effort to raise funds for Africa, and performed in the Live Aid concert that same year.
• Appeared on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and performed a controversial "Mardi Gras" number with footage intercut from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. CBS censors deleted the entire segment from the program.
• His album Midnight Special (1962) featured the first-ever recorded appearance by a then young harmonica player named Bob Dylan.
• Was the first African-American man to win an Emmy, with his first solo TV special "Tonight with Belafonte" in 1959.
• Received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1989, was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994, and he won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
• Actor, composer, author, producer and singer, educated at the New York Dramatic Workshop.
• He grew up in Jamaica, British West Indies, and did folk-singing in night clubs and theatres, and on television and records.
• His debut was at the Village Vanguard in New York.

Quotes

• "No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush, says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people support your revolution."
• ""Larry King Live" (1985)," October, 2002, clarifying his comments on Colin Powell: "It is my personal feeling that plantations exist all over America. If you walk into South Central Los Angeles, into Watts, or you walk into Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, you'll find people who live lives that are as degrading as anything that slavery had ever produced. They live in economic oppression, they live in a disenfranchised way. In the hearts and minds of those people, and millions of others, you're al
• "Unless you have had the experience of sitting in a village in war-ravaged Guatemala, or a humble, box-like room in the wretched South African township of Alexandra, or in a dust-covered hovel on a Native American reservation, or in the tin shacks that house the thousands who live desperate lives in East Kingston Jamaica, or in an overcrowded, below-poverty-level dwelling in a Ghetto in New York, Chicago, or Detroit, among people whose lives are dominated by their bitter struggle for existence a