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delancyhill Attorney Marlon Hill Interviews Activist/Artist Icon Harry Belafonte at Miami Book Fair International

November 15, 2011 6:00 pm

With a standing room only Chapman Conference Room Hall, delancyhill Attorney Marlon Hill introduced and welcomed artist and civil rights icon Harry Belafonte to the Annual Miami Book Fair International.  Hill teased and roused the energetic book fair audience with an introductory rendition and call and response version of "Day-O", one of Belafonte's signature folk song standards.  

Speaking before an adoring crowd of over 600 patrons at Miami Dade College, Hill and Belafonte engaged in a 45 minute conversation on issues from his early childhood in Jamaica, life with his Jamaican immigration mother in Harlem, his rise to fame on the theatrical and cabaret circuit, and his relationship with othe icons, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, and Nelson Mandela.

Belafonte was on hand to promote his new autobiography, My Song, and the companion documentary, Singing Your Song, now airing on HBO.

Belafonte  spoke fondly and at length about his musical and acting career, at one point joking that being labeled “the King of calypso” had cost him all his Trinidadian friends. But he kept coming back to his life of activism.

“I was an activist who became an artist,” Belafonte said, “not an artist who became an activist.” He chose “art as the essence of my life’s journey,” he added, so that he could fulfill his mother’s injunction to never miss an opportunity to correct injustice wherever he might find it.

While Belafonte spoke reverently of his friendship with Martin Luther King, he took pains to emphasize the fallible humanity of his friend. “We have a propensity for pushing people into deity and making them less real. People ask where will the next Dr. King come from. I say, where did the first come from?”

Quoting King, Belafonte gave his prescription for change: “Those caught under oppression will find those who are comfortable with their oppression, and only when you make them uncomfortable will they accept change.”

While the world has been altered since the 1960s, Belafonte sees the need for continuing activism. He described a hypothetical young woman emerging from a university with a masters degree as the fruit of past change — and her inability to find a job as the need for change present-day change.

From such young people, he declared, will arise “the Rosa Parks of this day.”

Belafonte closed the evening in signing hundreds of copies of his memoirs. 

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The Miami Herald

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/15/2504107/harry-belafonte-recounts-a-life.html

 

The Center @ Miami Dade College 

http://flcenterlitarts.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/actor-singer-activist-belafonte-says-the-struggle-for-justice-is-not-behind-us/

 

WLRN Blog

http://blog.wlrn.org/

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