Harry Belafonte in BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Actor, singer, and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte died today at his home in New York City at the age of 96. Belafonte, whose acting career made him a contemporary (and the last surviving stalwart) of a generation that included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Dorothy Dandridge, Ossie Davis, and Diahann Carroll, often took long hiatuses from moviemaking to pursue his musical and political interests. Despite a breakout 1950s in his acting career, Belafonte acted in zero films in the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He would no longer be interested in working on films that contained no elements of social justice.
In his final narrative film appearance (and first since 2006), Belafonte appeared in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018) as an elderly activist recounting to young black activists the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington (while paralleling Adam Driver’s character working undercover within a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan in order to root it out). One of the catalysts to Washington’s lynching was D.W. Griffith’s seminal The Birth of a Nation (1915) - a cinematically important but virulently racist work that gave rise to the modern KKK - which appears in the second half of this clip.
