He was a mentor to many across the world, including the famous Miriam Makeba. He was one of the best singers ever, churning out enchanting music and winning all the major awards available, including the Emmy, Grammy and Oscar… But his life work was for social justice, and this was the least reported. Belafonte continued his fight for social justice until 25 April, when our ancestors on the other side of the river, invited him to paddle over.
: “I was born into poverty, grew up in poverty, and for a long time poverty was all I thought I’d known.” When he started out, he had a role model: Paul Robeson, a famous actor, singer and activist. But Robeson had from the late 1940s been deliberately and openly destroyed by the US government. Employing state agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the American government had prevented the entertainment agencies from hiring him.
As part of his anti-war campaign, Belafonte on 15 February, 2003 told a rally that President Bush was leading the US into a fraudulent war in Iraq, as his predecessors had done in the conflicts in Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cuba. He concluded by saying: “Dr King once said that … if mankind does not put an end to war, war will put an end to mankind.”
Belafonte’s leadership of the American anti-war movement was much more biting, not just for its effectiveness, but also for the fact that while Du Bois had been an intellectual, he had been in the US Navy serving during the Second World War. He was also angry with those he considered the Uncle Toms of the Bush team for pushing the war agenda and working “in the service of our oppression and those who create new ways in which to oppress us… And that is my argument with General Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. I expect, as do others, that their history should have prepared them for a much better articulation about how to treat people globally.
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