NEW YORK — Carmen Berkley, a strategist with a Seattle-based foundation advocating equity and racial justice, remembers meeting She’d gone to Florida to attend a sit-in protest that other young Black activists had staged at the Capitol in Tallahassee over the , a Black teenager fatally shot in 2012 by a resident of a gated community who decided Martin looked suspicious. Berkley recalls “this magical moment” when Belafonte showed up to encourage the Capitol demonstrators.
“So many people have stepped into a legacy he helped create,” said David J. Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, which has a mission to “end racism, homophobia, and LGBTQ/SGL bias and stigma.” Shortly before the news broke that Belafonte had died, Johns had been on a panel in Miami, Florida, discussing equality and the preservation of democracy.
“He’d be the first to throw his support behind young people rising up, and never tried to pacify the rage or anger or disappointment we were feeling,” Brown said. “He never preached at us. He, instead, affirmed the work we were doing, opened his doors, cleared space for us and always listened.”“I witnessed this icon, this giant, shift in his own political development and thinking,” she said. “It taught me you’re never too old, or too wise, to learn and grow.
Kerry Kennedy is the president of the nonprofit organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Belafonte was a board member, engaged right up until his death with the center’s activities. Asked if she ever discussed with Belafonte his reasons for becoming an activist, she laughed and said you couldn’t even have a conversation about lunch without Belafonte turning the subject “right back to civil rights and social justice.
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