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Harlem neighborhood by 1940 to live with his mother, Melvine, who struggled to hold her family together amid grinding poverty.
“She was the one who taught him that you shouldn’t let the sun go down without fighting against injustice,” Judith E. Smith, author of “Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical,” says about Belafonte’s mother.
Belafonte had a tumultuous childhood and often had to fend for himself.
“The most difficult time in my life was when I was a kid,” he told a magazine interviewer. “My mother gave me affection, but, because I was left on my own, also a lot of anguish.”
Belafonte dropped out of high school and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1944. He was relegated to manual labor on the ship and didn’t see combat, but the experience proved to be profound. He met college educated Black men who gave him a wider exposure to the world, talking to him about big issues such as segregation and colonialism. The experience of fighting against fascism abroad while coming back to segregation at home angered Belafonte, much like many Black veterans from World War II.
He drifted into the entertainment field almost by accident. Belafonte was working as a janitor in New York when he attended a play at the American Negro Theater. He was so swept up by the performance that he decided to become an actor.
Source: CNN.
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