Reading Black Reconstruction Today
Edited by Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, and Damien M. Sojoyner
University of California Press, 2026
[Publication date: August 11, 2026]
Edited by Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, and Damien M. Sojoyner
University of California Press, 2026
[Publication date: August 11, 2026]
We are living through a period of perpetual crises and explosive struggles for liberation on a global scale. This transdisciplinary collection explores what W. E. B. Du Bois's groundbreaking 1935 work, Black Reconstruction in America, tells us about repression and resistance across the world, asking: What do abolition and reconstruction mean today? What would it take for these concepts to become a global reality? How can we make sense of our political moment, from the resurgence of Black consciousness across the Americas, to the rise of neofascism in Europe and beyond, to the fight against land dispossession in Africa? Reading "Black Reconstruction" Today draws together a group of leading scholars and activists to explore the lasting relevance of Du Bois's political masterwork
REVIEWS:
REVIEWS:
From the Back Cover
"Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is a rich and rigorous exploration of W. E. B. Du Bois's great work. This volume will be an indispensable resource for teachers, students, and scholars, for anyone who is reading Du Bois and thinking with him about the legacy of the Reconstruction era and the world-building possibilities of abolitionism."
―Kevin Bruyneel, author of Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States
"W. E. B. Du Bois's masterful drama of insurgent Black politics and counterrevolutionary violence is as relevant today as it was in 1935. Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is an important engagement with Du Bois's work. It is well written, with concise and trenchant arguments that will be meaningful for a broad public interested in thinking with Black Reconstruction, as well as those trying to understand the present conjuncture."―Alex Lubin, Professor of African American Studies and History, Penn State University
"Visionary scholars Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, and Damien Sojoyner have curated a collection of essays that powerfully marshal W. E. B. Du Bois's towering historical analysis while offering sophisticated, original contributions. Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is a brilliant volume that extends key insights from Du Bois's classic text to engage with contemporary struggles against racial enclosure and urgent endeavors to create another world."―Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Yousuf Al-Bulushi is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City.
Geo Maher is founding Coordinator of the W. E. B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction in Philadelphia, and author of Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance.
Damien M. Sojoyner is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums.
The Lowest Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century
by Justin Leroy
Columbia University Press, 2026
[Publication date: April 21, 2026]
"W. E. B. Du Bois's masterful drama of insurgent Black politics and counterrevolutionary violence is as relevant today as it was in 1935. Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is an important engagement with Du Bois's work. It is well written, with concise and trenchant arguments that will be meaningful for a broad public interested in thinking with Black Reconstruction, as well as those trying to understand the present conjuncture."―Alex Lubin, Professor of African American Studies and History, Penn State University
"Visionary scholars Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, and Damien Sojoyner have curated a collection of essays that powerfully marshal W. E. B. Du Bois's towering historical analysis while offering sophisticated, original contributions. Reading 'Black Reconstruction' Today is a brilliant volume that extends key insights from Du Bois's classic text to engage with contemporary struggles against racial enclosure and urgent endeavors to create another world."―Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Yousuf Al-Bulushi is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City.
Geo Maher is founding Coordinator of the W. E. B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction in Philadelphia, and author of Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance.
Damien M. Sojoyner is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums.
The Lowest Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century
by Justin Leroy
Columbia University Press, 2026
[Publication date: April 21, 2026]
Throughout the nineteenth century, Black thinkers grappled with the material limits of freedom. They insisted that emancipation without economic self-determination would reproduce the inequalities of slavery, arguing that true freedom required not only civil rights and suffrage but also defending the rights of workers and curbing the power of capital. They concluded that free Black life could not flourish in conditions of labor exploitation and economic deprivation.
The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow. Justin Leroy argues that figures such as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Ida B. Wells developed a critique of racial capitalism that remains underappreciated. Their theories spanned the eras of slavery and freedom, connecting the North and the South, by illuminating the political economy of racial domination and the interwoven relationship between race and capitalism. By situating their work within broader debates about land, labor, and capital, Leroy provides a new framework for understanding how freedom was theorized, contested, and ultimately constrained in the aftermath of slavery. Bridging Black studies, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism, The Lowest Freedom offers a reinterpretation of African American political thought that places the struggle for economic justice at its core.
REVIEWS:
"Justin Leroy has produced an indispensable and dazzling book that will forever change our understanding of modern intellectual history. He reintroduces us to nineteenth-century Black thinkers whose incisive critique of the political economy of slavery and capitalism rivals that of the leading economists of their times―and ours. Indeed, they anticipated by two centuries the question we are asking ourselves today: Is genuine abolition possible under racial capitalism? For the answer, read this book."
The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow. Justin Leroy argues that figures such as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Ida B. Wells developed a critique of racial capitalism that remains underappreciated. Their theories spanned the eras of slavery and freedom, connecting the North and the South, by illuminating the political economy of racial domination and the interwoven relationship between race and capitalism. By situating their work within broader debates about land, labor, and capital, Leroy provides a new framework for understanding how freedom was theorized, contested, and ultimately constrained in the aftermath of slavery. Bridging Black studies, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism, The Lowest Freedom offers a reinterpretation of African American political thought that places the struggle for economic justice at its core.
REVIEWS:
"Justin Leroy has produced an indispensable and dazzling book that will forever change our understanding of modern intellectual history. He reintroduces us to nineteenth-century Black thinkers whose incisive critique of the political economy of slavery and capitalism rivals that of the leading economists of their times―and ours. Indeed, they anticipated by two centuries the question we are asking ourselves today: Is genuine abolition possible under racial capitalism? For the answer, read this book."
-- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Justin Leroy's The Lowest Freedom is a landmark book in both the historical literature on the nineteenth-century United States and thinking about racial capitalism more generally. The next generation of scholars and perhaps even the next generation after that will use it as a trailhead and a point from which to orient their own work."
"Justin Leroy's The Lowest Freedom is a landmark book in both the historical literature on the nineteenth-century United States and thinking about racial capitalism more generally. The next generation of scholars and perhaps even the next generation after that will use it as a trailhead and a point from which to orient their own work."
-- Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
"Through its unique excavations of the Black radical tradition’s critiques of US freedom, The Lowest Freedom provides a radical rethinking of Black freedom and racial capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States."
"Through its unique excavations of the Black radical tradition’s critiques of US freedom, The Lowest Freedom provides a radical rethinking of Black freedom and racial capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States."
-- Zach Sell, author of Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Justin Leroy is assistant professor of history at Duke University. He is coeditor of Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia, 2021).
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane
by Andy Beta
Da Capo, 2026
[Publication date: March 3, 2026]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Justin Leroy is assistant professor of history at Duke University. He is coeditor of Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia, 2021).
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane
by Andy Beta
Da Capo, 2026
[Publication date: March 3, 2026]
The first full-length biography of Alice Coltrane, the jazz musician and spiritual leader whose forward-thinking music was overshadowed by her more famous husband, even as she brilliantly laid the groundwork for the new age, ambient, and electronic music that would follow.
Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) was one of the most misunderstood artists of the last sixty years. For most of her life—and even in the decades since her passing—she was primarily known as the widow of the late John Coltrane. John Coltrane is widely seen as being one of the greatest tenor saxophonists and composers of the 20th century, with a fervor and devotion approaching sainthood. Yet ever so slowly, that level of love and appreciation is also being bestowed upon pianist, organist, harpist, and composer Alice Coltrane.
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane is the first full biography of this remarkable, groundbreaking artist, and is an elegant, deeply researched corrective to the historical—and critical—record. It elevates Alice Coltrane to her proper place, both alongside her husband as one of the greatest musical visionaries of the 20th century, and also as a singular artist in Western music, one who became a spiritual leader in her lifetime.
In the years since her passing, she has become a great influence on a new generation of musicians, especially women, people of color, and artists who seek to combine jazz with other musical forms, be it modern classical, electronic, Indian music, and more. Cosmic Music also unearths previously unknown connections between Alice Coltrane and other generational icons, from Stevie Wonder, Carlos Santana, and Nina Simone to Mother Teresa and Doja Cat.
In Alice Coltrane’s music, one can perceive the transformation of Black American music in microcosm, the gospel roots giving rise to jazz and bebop, then intermingling with soul and R&B, and then onto rock, modern classical, psychedelia, and new age. Cosmic Music, based on extensive research and scores of new interviews by music journalist Andy Beta, is the definitive account of a visionary whose influence is only just beginning to be appreciated in full.
REVIEWS:
"The significance of Alice Coltrane’s presence in 20th Century Music cannot be overstated. Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music is a remarkable detailing of this visionary woman’s vocation in devotion to a sanctified art. From her childhood playing piano in the community of Pentecostal and Baptist churches, where ecstatic transcendence was at the heart of practice, to her engagement with the Detroit Jazz scene and finding a kindred spirit in a life shared with the great John Coltrane, her music is a timeless expression of both divinity and dignity."
Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) was one of the most misunderstood artists of the last sixty years. For most of her life—and even in the decades since her passing—she was primarily known as the widow of the late John Coltrane. John Coltrane is widely seen as being one of the greatest tenor saxophonists and composers of the 20th century, with a fervor and devotion approaching sainthood. Yet ever so slowly, that level of love and appreciation is also being bestowed upon pianist, organist, harpist, and composer Alice Coltrane.
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane is the first full biography of this remarkable, groundbreaking artist, and is an elegant, deeply researched corrective to the historical—and critical—record. It elevates Alice Coltrane to her proper place, both alongside her husband as one of the greatest musical visionaries of the 20th century, and also as a singular artist in Western music, one who became a spiritual leader in her lifetime.
In the years since her passing, she has become a great influence on a new generation of musicians, especially women, people of color, and artists who seek to combine jazz with other musical forms, be it modern classical, electronic, Indian music, and more. Cosmic Music also unearths previously unknown connections between Alice Coltrane and other generational icons, from Stevie Wonder, Carlos Santana, and Nina Simone to Mother Teresa and Doja Cat.
In Alice Coltrane’s music, one can perceive the transformation of Black American music in microcosm, the gospel roots giving rise to jazz and bebop, then intermingling with soul and R&B, and then onto rock, modern classical, psychedelia, and new age. Cosmic Music, based on extensive research and scores of new interviews by music journalist Andy Beta, is the definitive account of a visionary whose influence is only just beginning to be appreciated in full.
REVIEWS:
"The significance of Alice Coltrane’s presence in 20th Century Music cannot be overstated. Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music is a remarkable detailing of this visionary woman’s vocation in devotion to a sanctified art. From her childhood playing piano in the community of Pentecostal and Baptist churches, where ecstatic transcendence was at the heart of practice, to her engagement with the Detroit Jazz scene and finding a kindred spirit in a life shared with the great John Coltrane, her music is a timeless expression of both divinity and dignity."
―Thurston Moore, co-founder of Sonic Youth and author of "Sonic Life"
“Underappreciated in her time because she was not of it, since her passing in 2007, Alice Coltrane’s talismanic influence has only grown to embody the ‘monument eternal’ she left behind on this earthly plane. With lyrical prose and cinematic storytelling, Andy Beta takes us on a peripatetic journey in the footsteps of one of the most significant musical innovators and spiritual leaders of the past century, tracing the cosmic path of Alice McLeod, who became Alice Coltrane, who became Swamini Turiyasangitananda. Her spiritual evolution parallels her musical evolution, from Detroit piano prodigy, to John Coltrane’s soulmate and close collaborator who revolutionized the harp for jazz and improvised music, to Mother Turiya, the visionary guru of Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills. How does one get closer to the transcendent universal consciousness we hear in Journey in Satchidananda? One answer is to read this book.”
“Underappreciated in her time because she was not of it, since her passing in 2007, Alice Coltrane’s talismanic influence has only grown to embody the ‘monument eternal’ she left behind on this earthly plane. With lyrical prose and cinematic storytelling, Andy Beta takes us on a peripatetic journey in the footsteps of one of the most significant musical innovators and spiritual leaders of the past century, tracing the cosmic path of Alice McLeod, who became Alice Coltrane, who became Swamini Turiyasangitananda. Her spiritual evolution parallels her musical evolution, from Detroit piano prodigy, to John Coltrane’s soulmate and close collaborator who revolutionized the harp for jazz and improvised music, to Mother Turiya, the visionary guru of Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills. How does one get closer to the transcendent universal consciousness we hear in Journey in Satchidananda? One answer is to read this book.”
―Aidan Levy, author of "Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins"
“Andy Beta’s work on Alice Coltrane clarifies and contextualizes a still-extraordinary presence in American music.”
“Andy Beta’s work on Alice Coltrane clarifies and contextualizes a still-extraordinary presence in American music.”
―Ben Ratliff, author of "Coltrane: The Story of a Song"
“Definitive. . . . [Cosmic Music] not only fills out [Alice Coltrane’s] life, it goes a long way toward redeeming her as an artist. . . . Artists like Radiohead, Björk, and David Byrne have promoted her work, and Beta’s book does a valuable service as well; in its precision, empathy, and musical understanding, the book scours off the condescension that’s clung to her reputation and reveals her anew. An invaluable life of a pioneering artist, only now beginning to be fully understood.”
“Definitive. . . . [Cosmic Music] not only fills out [Alice Coltrane’s] life, it goes a long way toward redeeming her as an artist. . . . Artists like Radiohead, Björk, and David Byrne have promoted her work, and Beta’s book does a valuable service as well; in its precision, empathy, and musical understanding, the book scours off the condescension that’s clung to her reputation and reveals her anew. An invaluable life of a pioneering artist, only now beginning to be fully understood.”
―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Alice Coltrane was co-architect, alongside God, of some of the most spiritually profound and formally challenging music ever made. The way Andy Beta tells it, it is one of the greatest adventures of the 20th century."―David Keenan, author of "This is a Memorial Device"
"Beta has a fantastic sense of what information is key to the story because he clearly understands his subject, and he operates from a place of generosity and curiosity, which are the book's vital characteristics and why it is so successful."―Salon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Andy Beta is an award-winning arts and music writer. His writing on rock, jazz, experimental, and electronic music has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times,Texas Monthly, NPR, We Jazz Magazine, and many more. He lives in New York City with his family.
Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made
by Joshua Jelly-Shapiro
Penguin Press, 2026
[Publication date: August 4, 2026]
A vibrant, revealing portrait of the "King of Calypso," whose extraordinary performing career and activism helped remake America through the civil rights era and beyond
Even three years after his death, Harry Belafonte is everywhere. You can’t go to a wedding, or to a sports arena, without hearing “Day-O,” “Jump in the Line,” or “Jamaica Farewell.” The Harlem-born son of Caribbean immigrants, Belafonte turned the folk music of the islands into American pop—and shaped the fantasy of Caribbean life that endures as an ideal and as a multibillion-dollar tourist industry. Belafonte released the first million-selling LP in history. He was America’s first Black movie star, the first Black person to produce a prime-time special on network TV, and the first to win an Emmy Award. He was once the highest-paid Black performer of all time, beloved by Black and white fans alike, even under segregation. His artistic career helped create the pop culture of the twentieth century—and his political activism reshaped the course of American history.
In this sparkling new biography, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro brings Belafonte’s personality and music vibrantly to life, following him from rags to riches and from Harlem to Jamaica to the March on Washington. Jelly-Schapiro takes us inside Belafonte’s lifelong brotherhood with Sidney Poitier, his friendship with Fidel Castro, his collaboration with Nelson Mandela, and the sometimes shocking therapeutic relationships his difficult upbringing necessitated. At the heart of the story is Belafonte’s bond with Martin Luther King Jr., whose cause Belafonte would champion for the rest of his life. That commitment to the greater good would sustain him and benefit untold numbers—and would come at a cost.
The indelible story of an American icon—and a provocative study of authenticity, fame, and conviction—Daylight Come is, like Harry Belafonte himself, brimming with style and consequence.
REVIEWS:
“In this masterful biography, Jelly-Schapiro demonstrates Belafonte's transformative influence on the Black freedom struggle . . . Ever relevant, ever challenging, ever passionate, Belafonte never stopped singing out for justice.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Jelly-Schapiro portrays Belafonte as following his own political compass rather than appeasing the powerful or playing the inoffensive celebrity. Still, the author is clear-eyed . . . The book stresses how Belafonte inspired generations of Black artists and thinkers. But it’s what he did outside the spotlight that, conversely, makes his star shine brighter—and makes Daylight Come a memorable biography.” —BookPage
“A welcome biography of an artist and activist who left an enduring legacy.” —Kirkus
“Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's Daylight Come takes us to places no biography in recent memory has. Through the discipline of research, and through love, Jelly-Schapiro's far-reaching portrait of Harry Belafonte, one of the twentieth century's greatest stars, is also the story of the bitter effects of colonialism and segregation, and the human desire and need to transcend both, the better to become a self. This book fills the heart and mind, and is essential reading for our times.” —Hilton Als
“Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is one of those rare writers who bridges worlds—between deep scholarship and gorgeous prose, between islands and mainlands, between big ideas and precise details, between history and possibility.”
—Rebecca Solnit
“As graceful and arresting as its legendary subject, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Daylight Come captures the sweep, majesty, barrier-breaking artistry and radical, grassroots dynamism of a pop culture icon who was also a Civil Rights change-maker and American visionary. Jelly-Schapiro’s deft ability to weave together large-scale history with an intimate and richly complex portrait of Harry Belafonte is a dazzling achievement. Reading Daylight Come is a reminder of just how singular and essential Belafonte was to both the making of our modern era and our ever-present dreams for a liberated Black world.” —Daphne A. Brooks
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names; Island People: The Caribbean and the World; and, with Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. His work appears regularly in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. Jelly-Schapiro teaches journalism at New York University and is director of publishing at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where he hosts the popular Author Talks series and is coeditor in chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Harry was the first. You have to start with that. In 1956, a Harlem-bred son of Caribbean immigrants released the first million-selling LP in history. Belafonte was bigger than Elvis. And that's not the only first he laid claim to in his triumphant march across American media in the years that followed. He was the first Black movie star to become a matinee idol, thanks to a star turn in Island in the Sun in 1957, and the first Black person to produce a prime-time special on network TV and to win an Emmy (for Tonight with Belafonte in 1959). He was America's first Black pop star to be as desired for his body as his music. And the first to cause a major scandal for having his elbow touched by a white lady (Petula Clark) on television. His performance-cum-translation of the Caribbean for the masses-white Americans for whom his music felt playful, foreign, and thereby racially and sexually safe-allowed him to straddle racial, sexual, and political taboos unthinkable to his Black contemporaries.
The historic LP that helped him do so, Calypso, was a suite of Caribbean folk tunes that won the top spot on Billboard's charts in June 1956-and stayed there for an unprecedented thirty-one weeks (before being knocked from its perch by-who else-Elvis Presley). Belafonte's name-making record didn't just cement his stature as a new kind of American celebrity. It launched a putative "calypso craze," which convinced not a few commentators that calypso was poised to upend rock 'n' roll as the dominant fad among American teens. ("Warning: Calypso Next New Beat; R.I.P. for R'n'R?," trumpeted Variety in December 1957.) Such predictions may have had less to do with the music's actual popularity than with the wishful thinking of parents who found Belafonte's open-collared-but-still-dignified eroticism less scandalous than the louche gyrations of Elvis's pelvis. Nonetheless: it is hard to oversell the significance of the record that heralded the curious genre of world music; inspired the name of the most popular vocal group in America prior to the Beatles-the Kingston Trio; and perhaps most important, as Belafonte himself later put it, "proved that Americans were more ready than had been assumed to hear the voices of others or the culture of other people."
That last potent fact remains a crucial achievement. But what's perhaps most remarkable about Belafonte's early successes was that they served as mere forerunners and sparks for his larger public life. He used the cash he earned from scaling pop's heights in the late 1950s not to build mansions but to bankroll a still-speculative movement for civil rights. And then, as that movement picked up steam, he assumed an indispensable role as the crucial bridge between its protest marches and Hollywood's stars; between Black preachers who led the movement and white liberals who backed it; between Martin Luther King, Jr., the minister who became Harry's best friend, and the federal government. As the civil rights era reached its most intense phase in the early 1960s, he was the only person to speak, on a near-daily basis, with both Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general who was at first a tricky foil for King's aims but became a crucial ally.
But those also-remarkable facts, are only part of how his story at once resonated with, and has shaped, the story of his age. When in 1968 he accepted a historic invitation from Johnny Carson to serve as a guest host of The Tonight Show for an entire week, he invited his august friends from politics and showbiz-from Lena Horne and Bobby Kennedy to Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, and Buffy Sainte-Marie-to speak with unvarnished candor about America's ills and the disastrous war in Vietnam. He used an interview with Dr. King, not two months before King was killed, to ask if he feared for his life. It was an encounter on national TV, seen by millions, that only one man-Harry Belafonte-could have made happen. But it bears new weight when you consider that Harry had for years by then footed the bill for his friend's health care and supported his family. Far more than a celebrity fundraiser or spokesman, he was an integral part of this movement that changed the country forever.
America had seen Black celebrities before Belafonte. And in the postwar years, others also had won mass-market appeal. Sammy Davis, Jr., did so as the Rat Pack's self-deprecating mascot. Sidney Poitier became one of Hollywood's biggest stars by enacting, with gracious manners and un-American charm, a Black man who anyone but the most dire racist would be glad to bring home to dinner. The persona that Harry cultivated wasn't dissimilar to the one his close friend Sidney, a fellow West Indian who was from the Bahamas, used to scale Hollywood's heights: as a "Caribbean gentleman"-foreign and charming, proper and safe-whose image was far more palatable to whites than were Black entertainers descended from America's slaves. But behind Harry's easeful smile, there was a dose of sexuality and rage that left him allergic to playing roles meant to make whites comfortable. He turned down a few of those that made Poitier famous.
Decades later, talking to me at a restaurant near his home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, he said, "When me and Sidney were coming up, people took the way we carried ourselves as proud, imperial." That's how Harry broke it down, over a plate of littleneck clams the first time we met. "But that's every fucking Jamaican I know! And a lot of them are a pain in the ass!"
Harry, to those closest to him, could be a pain in the ass himself. His outlook was shaped from boyhood by extended sojourns in a Black-majority society-Jamaica-whose history and culture were shaped by its slaves’ rebellions against the island’s colonial owners, and where mixed-race families like his were commonplace. His Caribbean roots were inseparable from his American success. “I think people perceive him as a nice person,” said Johnny Carson, “and if people seem to like you, that’s half the game in the entertainment business.” Yet part of his magnetism also derived from the anger that drove him-anger at America’s racism; anger at himself and his dyslexia; anger at the demons he spent decades unpacking on his therapist’s couch. “Perhaps in the end,” he said of what he learned there, “where your anger comes from is less important than what you do with it.” What he did with his, in alchemizing his ire into his art and activism, changed the world.
Just as remarkable was the more personal journey he undertook to wrestle with his demons and with his country by evolving its culture. That journey would see him produce a film (Beat Street) that helped introduce hip-hop to the world; turn the world's eyes to modern Africa's urgent needs by recording "We Are the World" with stars ranging from Michael Jackson to Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper, and become a genial fixture on The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, in the 1970s and '80s, who was later known an elder radical and sometimes moral scold. Harry's life's third and fourth and fifth acts were as full of incident and impact as those preceding them.
What forces conspired, back when it all began, to help him become America’s “first Negro matinée idol”? How did he become the dominant figure in American pop right before the emergence of Elvis? What made him a kind of Representative Man capable of meaning all things to all people? In his life’s last decades, he became a totem of Black pride known for his intemperate radicalism (calling fellow son of the Caribbean Colin Powell “a house slave” ). But once he was our first post-racial pop star. He was a hero to immigrants, a sex symbol who was also a wholesome folkie, a teen idol who even your parents could love. How did Belafonte-not only brown-skinned but an avowed leftist, and an actor of unexceptional talent who got over as a singer-achieve his astonishingly wide appeal in Eisenhower’s America? One obvious answer is the one his fellow folk singer Odetta supplied to that question: “Have you seen the man?”
Quite apart from his looks, though, were Belafonte's innovations as a performer. He took folk music off its stool to make the presentation of dusty old songs an occasion for dynamic modern theater, and he used Caribbean music to forge his image as an erotic symbol and romantic lead. A decade before interracial marriage became fully legal in the United States, Belafonte's evocation of the islands got Americans to confront their history and try to change their present. As a struggling young actor in New York, he began singing in jazz clubs to make rent. But then he found his musical métier in the "folk revival" that took root among urban sophisticates drawn to the musical traditions of common people. He reveled in learning to perform Irish ballads and Hebrew anthems and folk tunes from Mexico and Mississippi. But his act also departed, in the pop polish and verve he lent that repertoire, from the folkies' fetish for authenticity-a mysterious quality whose strictures seemed to eschew any Black singer who hadn't done time on a chain gang or sold his soul at some crossroads down south.
A 1962 cover story on folk's rise in Time magazine, focusing on Joan Baez, went so far as to dub him "Belaphony." An appraisal that's aged better came from Baez's ex, Bob Dylan, who also transcended the scene that nurtured them all by plugging in at Newport to become an icon of uncompromising art. "Everything about him was gigantic," Dylan wrote. "The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry-who could have kicked the shit out of all of them-couldn't be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters."
Unlike Dylan, he didn't write his own songs; he mediated others'. But it was as a mediator of culture and enactor of songs-carried by his gorgeous voice, lent the beauty of his person-that he brought the stories of his people to the world. His brilliance as a performer was as a translator of folk histories, and the lives of working people, into the idiom of pop. By performing these stories, he created his own-and insisted, as he would his whole career, on telling his story on his terms. On the eve of the civil rights movement, he used his canny charisma to turn Americans' minds toward the legacies of slavery by singing of the Caribbean-a region that abounded in lilting melodies, but to whose islands were also trafficked the majority of the more than ten million enslaved Africans who, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, survived the Middle Passage to this hemisphere.
The fact and legacies of that history have suffused this republic’s culture and politics since its founding. Ongoing battles over iniquities that endure, and resentment at attempts to redress them, powered the ascent to the White House of a president who has suffused our public sphere with venality and hate, and with edicts proclaiming English the “official” tongue of the world’s most polyglot nation. In Trump’s America, “the voices of others or the culture of other people,” upon which Harry built his career, are verboten. About these developments, Harry had much to say before he passed. Criticizing presidents, notwithstanding his old friendship with the Kennedys, was a lifelong vocation (and extended to his often-fierce frustration with the moderate policies of America’s first Black one). Before he was a friend to the establishment, he was a man of the left and of the streets. His heroes and pals were political radicals like Paul Robeson, his mentor in stagecraft and Marxism; Dr. King and Nelson Mandela; prison abolitionists and trade unionists and advocates for #BlackLivesMatter whose comradeship he cherished later on-these were his people. One way to understand how his devotion to the edges shifted the mainstream is to see how his history entwined with that of the American president before Trump-and not merely because Harry helped arrange an airlift in 1961 that brought hundreds of African students, including one from Kenya who became Barack Obama’s dad, to the United States.
In Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father, there's a passage in which Obama describes a moment with his mother in a Manhattan movie house watching the Marcel Camus film Black Orpheus. He observes, with growing discomfort, the delight his white mother takes in the images of brown-skinned bodies dancing their way through a Brazilian slum. He realizes then how much of his cherished mom's life and politics-and indeed her attraction to his Kenyan father-had been born of her curiosity about difference-or perhaps her erotic attachment to it. This curiosity was first instilled, she'd often tell her son, when she'd fallen in love as a Kansas schoolgirl with the music and person of Harry Belafonte. For Obama, this moment arrives as a subtle lesson about the intimate registers on which race can act in our lives. But what it suggests as well is Belafonte's larger significance to postwar U.S. culture-as a figure Obama's mother was hardly alone in regarding as "the best-looking man on the planet."
In his stage shows from those years, it was that very universal appeal out of which he liked to make a famous spectacle. "Women over forty!" he'd entreat during the chorus to "Matilda," as captured on his famous Belafonte at Carnegie Hall record. "Now the intellectuals!" Decades before Barack Obama won the White House and Beyoncé became American culture's queen, Belafonte forged a blackness safe enough for the masses not by kowtowing to whites, or occluding his ethnicity and pride, but by making both essential to his glamour and grace. The story of his extraordinary rise, and of the ends to which he leveraged his affinities and fame, is not solely about his personal gifts and the anger that drove him. Nor is it one about the talents and acumen, not only onstage but also for business, that helped him succeed. It is also a story about the larger shifts in postwar America's economy and culture that shaped his sensibility and afforded his success-the advent of stereo sound and the long-playing record; the flourishing of a folk revival whose ethos and sounds would long reverberate; the rise of television as the prime medium and maker of celebrity in American life. And it's a story, too, about political history: the ending of colonial rule across the Third World and the admittance of one hundred new member-nations to the UN; the mass migration, during the Cold War, of thousands of immigrants from the Caribbean to New York; the birth and rise, in the United States, of a mass movement for racial justice.
