Kurzbeschreibung

Harry Belafonte spent his childhood in both Harlem and Jamaica, where the toughness of the city and the resilient spirit of the Caribbean lifestyle instilled in him a tenacity to face the hurdles of life head-on and channel his anger into positive, life-affirming actions. He returned to New York City after serving in the Navy in World War II, and found his calling in the theater, before transitioning into a career as a singer and Hollywood leading man. During the 1960s civil rights movement, Belafonte became close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., and used his celebrity as a platform for his activism in civil rights and countless other political and social causes. My Song tells the history of a movement through the stories of the people who sustained it, with the same exceptional candor with which Belafonte reveals himself on every page.

Rezension

A New York Times Notable Book

"A brave and spellbinding memoir . . . Belafonte tells a sweeping story. . . . Surprising and revelatory." - The Washington Post

"A gorgeous account of the large life of a Harlem boy." - Garrison Keillor, The New York Times Book Review

"The 'Song' of [Belafonte's] life has been . . . diverse, encompassing the heartbreaking ballads of poverty and loss, up-tempo pop songs of fame and wealth, and deeply felt spirituals of dedication to social justice. The world is richer for having heard them." - The Boston Globe

"This rich memoir chronicles a lifetime of activism alongside some of history's greatest heroes and sheds new light on moments that shaped our nation. Through it all, Harry exudes the same passion and candor I've experienced in our friendship and conversation over the years." - President Bill Clinton

"Absorbing. . . . Belafonte is a man of many conflicting identities, all of which he's needed to help change the world." - New York magazine

"An honest, in many ways important and genuinely revelatory autobiography. . . . My Song is a more than fitting denouement for a life well lived." - The Seattle Times

"Engrossing. . . . My Song is rich with vivid scenes of Belafonte working as an advisor, mediator, fundraiser and implementer." - San Francisco Chronicle

"Even amid the most intensely charged subject matter, Belafonte traces a path . . . with the easygoing charm of a born raconteur. Uncluttered and free of fuss, his narrative unfolds effortlessly. . . . The world may think of Belafonte as an entertainer first and an activist second, but My Song makes it engagingly, compellingly clear that he wishes his legacy to be prioritized the other way around." - The A. V. Club

"Harry Belafonte has led an extraordinary life. . . . Some of the richest passages . . . focus on Belafonte's social engagement." - USA Today

"To read Harry Belafonte's new memoir, My Song, is to discover a man who has packed enough life for ten people into eighty-four years." - NPR/ Morning Edition

"Belafonte certainly knows how to make an immediate and lasting impression. My Song follows suit with prose that's fluid yet intensely detailed. . . . [There's] a keen awareness of his greatness and place in history - but it's never overbearing. After all, it's not bragging when it's true." - The Austin Chronicle

"The entertainer-activist par excellence of his generation. . . . Belafonte, despite his gift for pungent soundbites, is a thoughtful man whose barbs are often tempered by nuanced observations on art, politics and race." - The Daily Beast

"Belafonte's story is the tale of a man who has well and truly balanced stardom and serious activism." - The New Republic

"A story of triumph amid adversity that focuses on the intriguing personal life of one of the 20th century's most iconic actors." - The Root

"Bracingly opinionated autobiography from an American original, still provocative in his ninth decade ." - Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Klappentext

An eloquently told personal account of an era of enormous cultural and political change, which reveals Harry Belafonte as not only one of America's greatest entertainers, but also one of our most profoundly influential activists.

Harry Belafonte spent his childhood in both Harlem and Jamaica, where the toughness of the city and the resilient spirit of the Caribbean lifestyle instilled in him a tenacity to face the hurdles of life head-on and channel his anger into positive, life-affirming actions. He returned to New York City after serving in the Navy in World War II, and found his calling in the theater, before transitioning into a career as a singer and Hollywood leading man. During the 1960s civil rights movement, Belafonte became close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., and used his celebrity as a platform for his activism in civil rights and countless other political and social causes. My Song tells the inspiring story of a startlingly original and powerful entertainer who has always engaged fiercely with the issues of his day.

Auszüge aus dem Buch

1

The phone rang late in the evening in my New York apartment. It was the night of August 4, 1964. A night of grief and anger for all of us in the civil rights movement, but especially those in Mississippi. "We've got a crisis on our hands down here," the young man on the line said. "We need help."

At the start of that fateful summer, hundreds of volunteers, most of them students, many of them white, all of them knowing how dangerous the work would be, had come down from northern universities to register black voters and support rural blacks in pursuit of their civil rights. They were fanning out along the front lines of a civil rights war, unarmed in a state of seething segregationists.

Mississippi's police stood ready at the slightest pretext to beat them bloody and throw them in jail. The Ku Klux Klan might well do worse. That day, we all learned just how much worse. The bodies of three volunteers, missing since June 21, had been found in a shallow grave near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman - two of them white, one black - had been arrested on an alleged traffic violation, briefl y jailed, then allowed to drive off, after dark, into a KKK ambush. All three had been beaten, then shot. Chaney, the black volunteer, had been tortured and mutilated.

I'd helped raise a lot of the money to launch Mississippi Freedom Summer. I'd called all the top entertainers I knew - Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, Dick Gregory, and more - to ask that they give money directly or participate in benefit concerts. That money bought a lot of gas and cars, housing and food. But now more was needed. A lot more.

The original plan had called for students to do two-week shifts, then go home and be replaced by others. With the ominous disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, every shift had insisted on staying.

Now that the bodies had been found, all those volunteers voted to stay not just through summer, but into the fall as well. "It's good they're staying," explained Jim Forman, the young man who called me that night. Jim was the de facto head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of several civil rights groups down there. "Because if they leave now, or even at the end of August, the Klan will say it intimidated them into going, and the press will play it that way. And if they all stay, we can get thousands of more voters registered. The problem is we don't have the resources to keep them all here."

"What do you need?" I asked.

"At least fifty thousand dollars."

I told him I'd get it, one way or the other. "How soon do you need it?"

"We're going to burn through the rest of our budget in seventy-two hours."

Before he rang off, Forman told me one other thing. "This could get really ugly," he said quietly. "I'm hearing a lot of people say enough is enough, the hell with nonviolence. They're taking up guns. I'm worried they're going to take matters into their own hands."

I had to think hard about where that money might come from, and how I might get it to Greenwood, Mississippi. I could tap my own savings for the whole $50, 000 - I'd written a check to SNCC for an amount not much smaller than that in its early days to help establish it, and others since then. For me it was "anything goes," but I owed it to my family to keep us fi nancially safe. Paul Robeson, the extraordinary actor, singer, and activist whose path I'd tried to follow my whole adult life, had given so much money to social causes that he'd left himself vulnerable to his enemies, chief among them the federal government, a formidab