Harry BelafonteHarry Belafonte is known worldwide for his accomplishments as a recording artist and concert singer, as an actor and a producer, and for his commitment to human rights.
Belafonte has a long and distinguished campaigning record. He became the entertainment industry's first cultural adviser to the Peace Corps in the early 1960s. He was a leading architect of the civil rights movement. And in l985, he helped bring together 45 top performers to record the song ˜We Are the World", which raised millions of dollars for emergency assistance in Africa. He was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador on 4 March l987.
Harry Belafonte was born in Harlem, New York. He later moved to his mother's birthplace, Jamaica, where he discovered the folk music that became his trademark. His third album, Calypso, became the first recording in history to sell more than a million copies. Since then Belafonte's concert tours have broken attendance records worldwide.
American audiences first saw Belafonte on Broadway in John Murray Anderson's Almanac (1953), for which he won a Tony Award. A Hollywood career spanning five decades followed. Belafonte was the first African-American man to win an Emmy, for his television music special Tonight with Harry Belafonte (1959), the first of several TV specials he produced.
The United States awarded Belafonte the National Medal of the Arts, one of its highest honours, in 1994. In 2000 he received the Ronald McDonald House Charities' 2000 Award of Excellence in recognition of his humanitarian work. Using the US$100,000 honorarium from this award, Belafonte launched the Harry and Julie Belafonte Fund for HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, which is administered by the US Fund for UNICEF.
FAIR USE NOTICE: The above may be copyrighted material, and the use of it on jowga.org may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available on a non-profit basis for educational and discussion purposes only. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 USC § 107. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
