Harry Belafonte, calypso star and civil rights champion, dies at 96
Singer Harry Belafonte speaks during a press junket at The Bing Decision Maker Series with the Sing Your Song Cast and Filmmakers on January 22, 2011 in Park City, Utah. Michael Buckner | Getty Images

Harry Belafonte, the effortlessly graceful singer credited with popularizing calypso in the U.S. in the 1950s who then marched at the forefront of the country's civil rights struggle for half a century, died Tuesday, according to his spokesman. He was 96. Belafonte died of congestive heart failure in New York City, longtime spokesperson Ken Sunshine confirmed to NBC News. Belafonte's legacy as an arresting, charismatic singer and actor, which was sealed with the release of the landmark album "Calypso" in 1956, spanned more than six decades. As recently as 2018 he made a bone-chilling appearance in the movie "BlacKkKlansman," portraying an older civil rights leader who recounts the judicial railroading and brutal lynching of Jesse Washington, a Black teenage farmhand, in Waco, Texas, in 1916. Belafonte, after several years of poor health, had to get his doctor's permission to shoot the scene. The movie's director, Spike Lee, told Deadline.com: "I said, 'Thank you, Jesus.' And I said to the crew: 'When you come to the set tomorrow, I want you to have a suit on, a tie, wear your Sunday best. If you dress lazy, don't come to work, because we have a very special guest.'" More from NBC News: Ginnie Newhart, the wife of Bob Newhart, dies at 82

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Archaeologists in Peru find adolescent mummy wrapped in bundle Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in New York's Harlem, in 1927, the son of Harold George Bellanfanti Sr., a Martinique-born chef, and Melvine Bellanfanti, a Jamaica-born housekeeper. Between the ages of 8 and about 13, he lived in Jamaica with his mother, returning to the U.S. to continue high school before he served in the Navy during World War II. Belafonte attended the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research on the G.I. Bill, in a class that included Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau and Sidney Poitier, who would become a lifelong friend.

American singer Harry Belafonte performing in a recording studio, circa 1957. Pictorial Parade | Archive Photos | Getty Images

On the side, he sang in New York nightclubs, where he found his first success turning his smooth, elegant renditions of pop, jazz and folk classics into an engagement at the Village Vanguard, where he was soon spotted by RCA Victor and signed to a record contract in 1952. Belafonte was urged by the Black novelist and songwriter William Attaway to "view folk songs as a body of social knowledge, a collective resource open to all," the University of Massachusetts scholar Judith E. Smith wrote in her 2014 biography, "Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical." Belafonte thereafter focused on vernacular and folk music, much of it expressions of the Black and Caribbean experience. Within a year, he had a hit single, "Matilda," which would stay in his repertoire for decades. By 1954, he had hit No. 3 on the album charts with "Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites." He had also scored on Broadway, winning a Tony for best performance by an actor in a leading role in a musical in 1954 for the revue "John Murray Anderson's Almanac." And then came 1956, when he ruled the music world with two No. 1 albums, "Belafonte" and "Calypso," a landmark in American popular music that was the first LP record to be certified with sales of 1 million or more. The album — which included Belafonte's signature number, "Day-O (Banana Boat Song)," with its unforgettable Jamaican dockworker's lament — spent 99 weeks on the charts, 31 of them at No. 1, which remains the fourth-longest run in Billboard chart history. It also established calypso, an African Caribbean folk blend rooted in Trinidad and Tobago, as an enduring component of the American music scene, earning him the nickname the "King of Calypso." It paved the way for a wave of folk acts that dotted the charts through the beginning of the British music invasion of the mid-1960s and continues to influence folk and "island music" artists like Jimmy Buffett, Alison Hinds, Buster Poindexter, Mighty Sparrow, the Mighty Vikings and David Rudder. "Years later, it remains a record of inestimable influence, inspiring many folk singers and groups," the noted music historian and writer Cary Ginell wrote of "Calypso." Belafonte established himself on television during the 1950s and '60s, receiving an Emmy in 1960 for his performance in the musical special "Tonight With Belafonte," which made him the first Black artist to win an Emmy. He followed it up with another nomination the next year. By 1954, Belafonte was in the movies, as well, having won a prized lead role in the film adaptation of "Carmen Jones," the all-Black Broadway musical re-imagining of Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen." Despite his record sales and his Tony Award for a musical revue, Belafonte wasn't allowed to sing in the movie — his songs were dubbed by the opera singer LeVern Hutcherson.

Honoree Harry Belafonte accepts the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award onstage during the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences' 2014 Governors Awards at The Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center on November 8, 2014 in Hollywood, California. Kevin Winter | Getty Images

Seeking to take control of his career, Belafonte mounted his own movie production in 1959, "Odds Against Tomorrow," a gritty film noir written by the blacklisted screenwriter Abe Polonsky and backed by a John Lewis score. The film, about a Black nightclub entertainer's clashes with a racist white bank robber, was well reviewed, and it was nominated for a Golden Globe, but it flopped at the box office. It was one of many boundary-pushing moments throughout Belafonte's life and career — in April 1968, for example, a TV special starring Belafonte and the white pop singer Petula Clark created a national stir because Clark briefly touched Belafonte's arm during a duet. Such incidents only empowered Belafonte, whose social consciousness began to emerge during the early 1950s under the guidance of Paul Robeson, the polymath singer, artist and activist he called his mentor. From 1954 until 1961, Belafonte refused to perform in the Deep South, making him a target of white racist commentators and landing him for a time on Hollywood's notorious blacklist during the McCarthy era. By the early 1960s, Belafonte had become a force in the civil rights movement. Already a confidant to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he campaigned for Sen. John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign, and after Kennedy was elected, he became an intermediary between King and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. It was Belafonte who put up the money in 1963 to bail King out of jail in Alabama, where King most forcefully articulated the civil rights strategy of nonviolence in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

A crowd of over 10,000 civil rights marchers gathers in the Manhattan Garment Center as Harry Belafonte sings at spiritual at a civil rights rally. Bettmann | Bettmann | Getty Images

Belafonte became associated with King in 1956 at a New York fundraising event for activists working in Montgomery, Alabama. King later said Belafonte was "a key ingredient to the global struggle for freedom and a powerful tactical weapon in the civil rights movement here in America," adding: "We are blessed by his courage and moral integrity." King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, so trusted Belafonte that after King was assassinated in 1968, Belafonte was appointed as the executor of King's estate. "Whenever we got into trouble or when tragedy struck, Harry has always come to our aid, his generous heart wide open," Coretta Scott King wrote in her 1969 autobiography, "My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr." Belafonte supported a wide variety of civil rights causes throughout the 1960s — as a main financier of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he even flew to Mississippi to join the organization's Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign in 1964.

(Original Caption) 4/4/1965-New York, NY: Entertainers Harry Belafonte (L) and Sammy Davis Jr. (R) join Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Times Square benefit show called "Broadway Answers Selma." A capacity audience of civil rights advocates turned out to watch a glittering array of theater personalities perform. Bettmann | Bettmann | Getty Images