Harry Belafonte: The Real Deal

27:45Like one of them takes a sip, hands it to the other one, and then she takes a sip. That's the closest thing to an on-screen kiss that there was. Not close to a kiss. No, but it was so groundbreaking that the South Carolina legislature introduced a bill. I don't know if they passed it, that would find any theater in South Carolina that showed Island in the Sun. That's how controversial that movie was. And it sounds so tame that it's actually preposterous and, like, embarrassing now. But that was at the forefront of pushing the envelope as far as race relations in America went. And that's why Harry Belafonte was like, yes, give me that role.

28:28I will totally take that role. Yeah, for sure. In real life, IRL, he married his second wife around the same time. Her name was Julie Robinson. She was a dancer, and she was white. And they were probably, I would not even say one of the most, they were probably the most prominent interracial couple in America at the time. For sure. She was also Brando's girlfriend when they met. Look out, Marlon. Harry Villafonte, pretty handsome guy. Oh, man, beyond handsome. Yeah. So, Chuck, when we were just talking about Islands in the Sun, I was saying that Harry Belafonte would totally choose a role that pushed the envelope for race relations.

29:10Not to stick it in the eye of white America, but to push things forward and just basically say black people are people, too. Let's portray them as such on the screen. OK. Yeah. In doing that, he had to choose over and over and over again between advancing his career and standing by his values. And without missing a single opportunity, he stood by his values every time. Yeah. I mean, he was offered, and that's kind of what I was alluding to earlier, he was offered roles. He called them Uncle Tom roles. And he said that's about all you could get at one point in Hollywood or on stage. And he just wouldn't play those roles.

29:50He, you know, it depends on who you are and where you draw the line. And, I mean, that's where he drew his line. His good friend Sidney Poitier would take not necessarily those roles, but other roles that Harry Belafonte didn't think had enough sort of nuance for a black actor or spoke to his truth. Sometimes his friend Sidney Poitier would take those roles, not in any way like a sellout or anything like that. He had his own ideas of how to, you know, advance the cause and advance his career and stay in the limelight so he could do his good work as well. But, you know, they were rivals in a way, but also best friends.

30:30Yeah, exactly. But certainly professional rivals, because almost invariably the roles that Belafonte passed on would go to Poitier because, like you said, he would take these roles. and he was, he became as a result, the ambassador of black America to white America because these roles he was taking in the early sixties, these, these films were written to advance the cause of black civil rights in the United States. And Sidney Poitier is like, yes, put me out there. Tell me what we need to do. And let's, let's show these Americans that black people are people too. and like you said, Belafonte was like, there's just, it's still missing some stuff.

31:09And like Lilies of the Field is a good example. It's from 1963. It starred Sidney Poitier. He went on to an Oscar for it. And he plays a black man who is helping Nazi nuns hide from the communists. And the reason Belafonte passed on it is because he said that this black man has like no background, no history, he's not really a human. He said to Henry Louis Gates and junior in 1996 in the New Yorker, it's a really good article. He said he didn't kiss anybody. He didn't touch anybody. He had no culture. He had no history. He had no family. He had nothing. So he was like a, not even a caricature of a black person.

31:49He was like human being happens to be black go, you know? And that just was not nearly enough for what Harry Belafine was willing to take on as an actor. So he would just let these things come and go and pass on them, or else he would try it, push the envelope, that thing would get canceled, and he'd just move on. He never, ever went to Hollywood, you know, on his knees or asking. Like, they came to him, and he would either pass or not based on what kind of, how willing they were to portray Black people in that film. Yeah. Highly principled decision-making career-wise. Yes, that's very tough to do, period, but very tough to do trying to make it in a cutthroat business like Hollywood, you know, for sure, man.

32:36So in 56, this was, you know, kind of right around the time he had gotten married and that Islands in the Sun had come out. Just before that, he got a phone call from Martin Luther King Jr. And they ended up meeting in person and having a four hour meeting on their their first meeting. And this is this is sort of what lit the fire for Belafonte to really, really get into very public civil rights work. It was his awakening in a lot of ways. And he wasn't just like, yeah, you know, I'll show up and I'll be a celebrity face here and there. He was bailing civil rights leaders out of jail. He and Sidney Poitier were smuggling cash, 70 grand, into Mississippi during the Freedom Rides.

33:23And, you know, with the Freedom Schools, I think we did a whole episode on the Freedom Schools at one point. He helped. He didn't just show up at the March on Washington. and he was one of the organizers. So he was in deep doing the hard work. Yeah, and he looked out for MLK's family during MLK's life, but also he funded his children's education. He took out a huge life insurance policy against MLK, and then he just was there for the family afterward. Like he kind of stepped in when MLK was assassinated. So he certainly walked the walk. He was at all these, you know, sit-ins and rallies and marches.

34:10And he just was there. Like you said, he wasn't just a figurehead. He didn't just show up for the press. He didn't just write checks behind the scenes. He did it all. And again, it just goes right back to the upbringing from his mom who taught him, like, not only just wherever you see injustice in the world, go fight it and try to fix it, like actively search every day for injustice that you can go help. And, you know, there was nothing more unjust and right in your face for an American, a black American in particular at the time than the civil rights movement. Yeah, absolutely. So his, you know, entertaining or entertainment career kept blossoming as well, kind of in conjunction with this.

34:55And he would use that to sort of, you know, help subtly raise awareness just about his community and what he's like and what his people are like. And The Tonight Show is a big example. In 1968, Johnny Carson invited him to host for a week, to host The Tonight Show, you know, take Johnny's seat. First black guest host in the history of the show. And this is in 1968, you know, Everything going on in 1968 seems fraught, and race relations certainly were a part of that. And he wasn't like, all right, I'll go host the show, and I'll get in and just kind of tried out the usual guest that Johnny might have.

35:35He said, no, I'm going to have Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick and Paul Newman and Nipsey Russell and all these people who had these progressive causes or were just famous black entertainers who didn't get that kind of stage very often and open every night with a song. Obviously, Johnny didn't do anything like that. So it was still fun and entertaining, but it was also educating people and talking about serious issues in these interviews. Yes. So that was just huge. I mean, also, you've got to credit Johnny Carson, too. He did that on purpose. He wasn't like, I'm going on vacation for a week.

36:16Just call whoever. Like, he did that on purpose because he was trying to advance race relations as well. So hats off to him for that as well. They also had really high ratings. That was another thing, too. you. Harry Belafonte, when he did something on TV, it drew viewers. And even still, it didn't matter because there were so many angry white racists in America that would call up these sponsors and be like, you're sponsoring this black guy on this show. You better stop. They'd go to the producers. The producers would come to Belafonte and be like, hey, you know how you have white people and black people dancing together?

36:49What if we just did white or just did black? Belafonte they wouldn't blink and it would get canceled despite all of the crazy great reviews and viewership it had. And, you know, that would be that. And he would just kind of move on. But of course he developed like this distrust and distaste for the entertainment industry. And I saw that he initially thought that he would be able to help change America through Hollywood. And then he quickly came to see like, no, Hollywood is just one more facet of this machine that keeps things going exactly as they are. So he got really disgusted by that. Kind of fortunately for us, because he really kind of started to throw more and more of his energy into being an activist, not just in the United States, but around the world.

37:37And in particular, Paul Robeson, like you said, was one of his idols, who was also just one of the early civil rights crusaders around the world. And then Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife, first lady, introduced him to the plight of different countries in Africa, which was decolonizing at the time. And he really kind of turned his attention toward that continent for a while. Yeah, for sure. I mean, all of the major causes that you've heard from, you know, basically starting then, and especially through the 80s with apartheid in South Africa, Kenyan independence. And I mentioned early on We Are the World, Ethiopia and the famines there.

38:20He was the guy that called up Quincy Jones and was like, hey, we need to do something here. And We Are the World was a huge, huge hit that sold, I think, 20 million copies and raised 65 million bucks for fame and relief. And if you were a kid in 1985, We Are the World was like, that and Live Aid were two of the biggest deals in music history. And, you know, I was 14 years old at the time, and it was just like, it was incredible to see all these people together. And, like, even as a kid, even as a, like, little snot-nosed 14-year-old white kid from the South, I knew that I was watching was important.

39:02I didn't maybe fully understand it. I had seen stuff about the famine on television, but it was it was raising awareness for everybody, including little white suburban kids from Georgia. Yeah, which is, you know, exactly part of the point in addition to raising money, too. Yeah. One of the cool things I saw about it was, I'm not sure if it was his idea or if he kind of headed up the push to do this or both. But Harry Belafani is credited with talking radio stations around the world into playing We Are the World at the same time on the same day. It was, I think, March 28th, 1986. I remember. There was something like, do you remember that?

39:42Oh, yeah. Cool. There was like 5 ,000 radio stations around the world, and they all played it at the same time, I think 10.50 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. And Muzak actually played it as well. And it was only the second time in the history of Muzak that they played voices over their service, which, by the way, at the time reached like 80 million Americans. So that's a lot of people listening to We Are The World at that same moment, which is neat. That's right. Including just, I accounted for one of those. I don't remember listening to it on the radio, but I do remember my family sitting around listening to the record.

40:17Yeah, so funny. All right. Maybe we should take our second break and come up and talk some more about Harry Belafonte. OK. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Harry Kundabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that, or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that.

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43:19All right, so Harry's doing his activism. He is still an entertainer. He never, you know, sort of fully left that behind. And, you know, he started doing less and less of that as like through the sort of 80s and 90s when his activism was, I think, at its peak. But he was still doing his thing. In 1960, he became the first black American to win an Emmy for Tonight with Belafonte, one of his TV specials. Again, which they were all super big hits, even though people loved them and the ratings were through the roof. It was that silent majority complaining about Petula Clark holding his arm, a white woman holding his arm in a special that drove away some advertisers, which is just, you know, very sad to say the least.

44:05But he was he was still serving up this sort of Caribbean tinge folk music to people. CBS ordered five more episodes after Tonight with Belafonte was such a big success. But, of course, that was one of the ones where sponsorship was pulled because he had black people and white people dancing and singing together. They said, no, no, no, no, you cannot do that. Right. And so he would just leave show business for, you know, years at a time or at least like TV or movies or something like that. But he got pulled back into it in the early 70s because his buddy Sidney Poitier was like, hey, I want to start directing blaxploitation movies.

44:43Let's do this. And they made Buck and the Preacher, which I have not seen. I think it was from 1972. Everything I've read about it makes me want to see it basically immediately. Sidney Poitier directed it, but he also plays Buck, who's this ex-Civil War soldier who helps ensure safe passage for African Americans moving out of Louisiana out west after the Civil War. And the preacher is Harry Belafonte, who's this con artist dressed as a preacher. It just sounds awesome. And then Uptown Saturday Night. Haven't seen that one either. It sounds pretty great, except it's so hard now to get past anything with Bill Cosby.

45:26Yeah. It's so hard, not just because of the horrible stuff he did, sexually assaulting women, but also because he was so preachy leading up to it. He was so holier than how. And it makes the whole thing so much worse, if you ask me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and this, he was doing those things back then, too. The CNN documentary that Kamau Bell did was very upsetting to see, but the way they did it, I think I mentioned it before, was it was, they were just sort of tracking his career and like, and he was the biggest star on TV at the time. And this was 1960 something. And then it was like, and in 1960, whatever, he sexually assaulted this woman.

46:08Right. And it was, it was happening the whole time. So I'm with you. It's impossible to watch that stuff, but you can watch Buck and the Preacher, though. Right. He's not in that. That's right. So hearing all this, you're like, wow, Harry Belafonte was Superman, and he never got in a bad mood, and he never got tired, and he was never frustrated. And it was just wine and roses all the time for Harry Belafonte, and that is not the case. It was a serious fatigue on his life. To do what he did was hard work, emotionally hard work, physically demanding, going all over the place doing his thing while also being an entertainer.

46:54And, you know, in 1968, I think this is a little bit after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. He was, Belafonte was asked what it's like being such a prominent civil rights leader. And he was pretty testy. He said, you know, I'd like to take my family and go live in Africa and be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people. I hate marching and getting called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats out of jail. And this is just the toll that that takes on anybody, even like a Superman like Harry Belafonte. Also a human. Yeah. But he had he had a really great inspiration in the form of Paul Robeson, who kind of guided things.

47:35You mentioned him before. He was an idol of his and a real inspiration. He was the guy who sang Old Man River, among other things. But he was a model for Harry Belafonte. Paul Robeson was running around the world. He took his fame and he used it to highlight plights around the world. But he was also like a huge—he protested for peace, and he ran around the world trying to make peace. I mean, between the U.S. and the USSR at the beginning of the Cold War, this guy was going back and forth trying to, like, create friendships where there was nothing but animosity. He did the same thing with communist China.

48:17And he was also not afraid to criticize the United States and, like, its racist policies, too, at the time. So you put all that together. This guy was prime meat for the McCarthy trials, and he got blacklisted, but he refused to be cowed. He would not name names. He would not renounce his work. He would not take back anything that they demanded he take back. And he really served as this model for Harry Belafonte. Despite, I mean, Robeson had it hard. He fell hard. The State Department, he was doing all this traveling to promote peace. The State Department suspended his passport from 1950 to 1958.

48:55kind of hard to run around the world pre-internet phones are still relatively expensive to use um trying to to organize peace when you can't travel outside of the u.s but um he was a really like he deserves it i think an episode himself but he stood as this inspiration and model for harry belafonte so even when he would get downtrodden and defeated he had paul robeson to look to and be like, this guy went through even worse than me. Yeah, for sure. And it wasn't always a love affair within the black community with Harry Belafonte. He was criticized at various times for marrying white women. He married two white women.

49:36After splitting up with Julie Robinson in 2004, he married Pamela Frank in 2008. he doesn't think he was of mixed race himself so he didn't feel like at times he was always fully accepted by the black community and he would be critical of that in 1996 in the New Yorker he said and again that's a great read he said let me tell you something I don't know of any artist at my level who has ever been as much on the line for black liberation as I have and has as few black people in attendance at anything he does as I do. And he described one of his typical concerts. I never saw so many white people in my life.

50:18So he never felt like he got the support from the black community that he thought he deserved and he thought he earned. And when it came to who he married, he said, you know, I didn't marry anyone to further an integration call. It's like I married who I fell in love with and they married me because they fell in love with me. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So we've kind of talked about some of the stuff, some of the causes he took up that he's best known for, like civil rights. Did you mention anti-apartheid? Yeah. He performed at a rally, a no-nuke rally in the early 80s in Germany. He sought to broker peace between the Crips and the Bloods in L.A.

50:59back in the late 80s. He protested the Iraq War in the early 2000s. And then the cause that he kind of got behind toward the very end of his life was incarceration in general. He was, I think, the first performer to play Rikers Island. James Brown famously did in 1972. Harry Belafonte did it a couple of months before James Brown. And then throughout the rest of his career, he would visit prisons and hang out with the inmates. But he also really focused on child incarceration and just found that totally amoral and immoral and inexcusable. So he really started a whole generation of like activists in that right before he died.

51:44It's just one more thing he did, you know. Yeah. He passed away just a couple of years ago in April, April 25th of 2023 at 96. So just a very full, long life and received lots of accolades during that lifetime. I mentioned the EGOT. Part of that included the Oscar was the Gene Herschel Humanitarian Award in 2014 and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2000. You can add the Kennedy Center Honor in 1989 to that list. And the National Medal of the Arts, old Billy Clinton gave him that one in 1994. And what else? In Harlem, he had a library named after him. In 2017, near his childhood home, it was renamed the Harry Belafonte 115th Street Library.

52:35Yeah. I also saw he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. and the bio almost defiantly dares you to be like, he's not rock and roll. They said that basically every artist who's mixed politics with their music, from Bob Dylan and Bono to Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy, they, quote, stand on his broad shoulders, which, I mean, that's absolutely true. Yeah, and there are plenty of non-quote-unquote rock and roll bands in that Hall of Fame. Sure, but they were like, say something, and then, you know. Yeah, back off. You did, and then you felt like a jackass. Yeah, like, is anyone going to really protest that?

53:14I don't know. I could see Gene Simmons saying something about it. Right. There's also a really great appearance on The Muppet Show where he sings Deo with some of the Muppets, and it's just sweet and wholesome and just great. Yeah, good stuff. One more thing. We cannot not mention Beetlejuice, dude. Oh, was he, did he have something to do with Beetlejuice? Yeah, obviously, people are already typing their emails. Beetlejuice featured not only the Banana Boat song, but Jump in the Line, which I like more than the Banana Boat song. I do, too. I love that song. To great effect, I think Tim Burton apparently wasn't super keen.

53:56He didn't think it was funny enough. And I'm like, dude, it's not funny. It's fun. You added two extra letters. It's not supposed to be like slap your knee funny. But it is certainly fun. and the little dance routines, they're almost like, apart from the movie itself, like an additional music video or something in the movie. But they are one small part, or I guess a large part, really, of what makes that movie so great were those two numbers. Yeah, and the whole thing is just amazing, but for some reason, Catherine O 'Hara is just, you just see she is so cool when she's doing this. Like, it's just perfect.

54:34And she's supposedly the one who suggested Calypso for the music that they use. Oh, that's funny. Not funny. No, it's not funny at all, Chuck. You're absolutely right. That's fun. But apparently Harry Belafonte said that about a year after Beetlejuice, he became popular with kids. Apparently, Deo and Jump in the line, they both ended up on the Billboard 200 after Beetlejuice for a little while. And he said that all sorts of kids would come up to him after they saw Beetlejuice. And he said that they would wipe their hands full of tomato ketchup and mustard on my clothes. And I enjoyed the whole excursion.

55:14Yeah, go listen to some of his stuff. I've been listening to it for two days. Harry Belafonte and the Belafonte folk singers. And some of it's maybe unusual to modern ears, but it's like really good stuff. Yeah, and it's even better if you watch footage of him singing it, too. His stage presence really comes across even on video years later. That's right. Did we mention he was handsome? He was. Easy on the eyes. Not hard to look at. No, for sure. He could really wear a shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, too, man. Oh, boy. I never could get away with that look. I can't either. All right. Well, that's Harry Belafonte, everybody.

55:51R.I.P., Harry. R.I.P. And if you want to know more about Harry Belafonte, like Chuck said, go look him up and start listening to him and watching some videos. And in the meantime, I think that means it's time for listener mail.

56:07This is just a little quickie. Hey, guys, I heard on a recent Christmas episode that you're desperate for new Christmas material. A few months ago, I sent in a show idea about the Halifax explosion. Did you know that this has a Christmas connection? Halifax was so thankful for the help from the city of Boston that we continue to send Halifax their city's Christmas tree to this very day. Pretty cool. Boston does or Halifax does? Boston sends, I don't know, Halifax sends Boston the tree. Yeah. Now the story is delightful. Yeah, yeah, it is. All the best from your neighbors in Canada. That is Matthias Dernford.

56:48That's a great one. We should have done that as like a segment, but now we can't because everybody knows it. Yeah, I mean, we did a whole episode on it, but this is a nice addendum. Did you say Matthias or Matthias? Well, I mean, there's an H in there. I don't know if it's pronounced, though. Matthias. I said Matthias. Good. Well, if you want to be like Matthias and have us debate how to say your name, love that kind of thing. You can send us an email, too, to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

57:32Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken.

58:10But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name. Part of the way through the valley of despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hey, it's Joel. And Matt. From HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back.

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