(New York) Harry Belafonte, 94-year-old African-American singer, actor and civil rights activist, was awarded the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor on Thursday evening in New York by the Ambassador of France in the United States, we learned on Friday.
During a private ceremony in New York, in the presence of Mr. Belafonte, Ambassador Philippe Etienne praised “the exceptional and unprecedented place of Harry Belafonte in public life (which) reflects the values dear to the United States and to the French Republic ”.
Among these “values”, the French diplomat cited “a number of founding principles of our democratic societies: the pursuit of freedom, equality and the guarantee of human rights for all”, according to a press release from the cultural services of the embassy .
Thus, “the singular impact of Mr. Belafonte on the lives of blacks and American culture, for more than seven decades, is a source of inspiration for France and the rest of the world, for future generations”.
Bewitching voice and charming physique, Harry Belafonte, nicknamed “the king of the calypso”, rose to fame in the 1950s and marked his time with his humanitarian convictions and his struggle for civil rights in the United States.
Harold George “Harry” Belafonte was born on 1er March 1927 in Harlem, in the north of Manhattan, of a Jamaican mother and a Martinican father.
After theater lessons and cabaret shows, he made his Broadway debut in 1953 in an award-winning musical (Almanac). Then, he made a career in cinema, Carmen jones (Otto Preminger, 1954) to Buck and his accomplice (Sidney Poitier, 1972) and Bobby (Emilio Estevez, 2006).
Harry Belafonte was the first African-American, in 1957, 10 years before Sidney Poitier, to play a love affair with a white woman, in Island in the Sun by Robert Rossen, and also the first African American to win an Emmy Award for his TV show Tonight with Harry Belafonte.
On the music side, he triumphed in 1956 with his cover of a slave song, Day-O, and his album Calypso is the first in history to exceed one million copies sold.
From 1960, the artist won six gold records and several Grammy Awards, became involved in multiple humanitarian causes and became close to Reverend Martin Luther King.
In the 1980s, he mobilized against apartheid in South Africa, promoting success We are the World, before being a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF for more than 30 years. In 2014, he received an honorary Oscar for his activism for civil rights and those of children.