Harry belafonte life biography
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Remembering Singer, Actor and Activist Harry Belafonte
Belafonte met Dr. Martin Luther King in the early 1950s when Belafonte went to hear King, who was still an obscure preacher, speak in Harlem. Both men were in their early 20s.
Harry belafonte life biography
The singer went all in, using his financial success to help support the pastor and his family and the civil rights movement.
"I threw my lot in with [King] completely, put a fortune behind the movement," Belafonte told The New York Times in 2017.
"Whatever money I had saved went for bonds and bail and rent, money for guys to get in their car and go wherever. I was Daddy Warbucks."
In 1956, Belafonte appeared at a fundraising event in New York with Coretta Scott King and Duke Ellington, and during the 1960s provided financial assistance to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as they planned and executed the Birmingham Campaign, a desegregation campaign that ran from April 3 to May 10, 1963.
During that time, King was