A Night with Harry Belafonte

I remember I had first encountered Harry Belafonte when I watched the classic western “Buck and the Preacher” with Sidney Poitier. I remember the film lingering with me because as a child I had never seen a Black cowboy - later I would later find out they made up 1 and 4 cowboys in the American west. The story was something unlike anything I had experienced. The story centered a caravan of Black refugees escaping the post-Civil War south and into the American plains as they are raided and pursued by a gang of white thugs hired by former plantation owners to scare them back into the arms of the jaws of the feudal sharecropping economy. In the end the issue is resolved when the Henry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier make an alliance with a Native American polity in the mountains to route the whites. I think the coverage of a western like that was something extremely new for me – something anti-colonial. Buck and the Preacher was a subversion of the genre of westerns, where the Black and the Native where the protagonist and the white man was the savage. It was something new for me and something that made me cultivate a great respect and admiration for Henry Belafonte.

Henry Belafonte was the son of West Indian immigrants to the United States, where he was constantly on the run evading federal immigration agents. Living in New York City and being the child of immigrant parents Harry Belafonte learned the unspoken laws that governed the white supremacist United States and would inform much of his work in film and activism. At his core Harry Belafonte was an activist. Mr. Belafonte had participated on the 1963 march on Washington and in his later years was a soldier in the war on apartheid in South Africa. Mr. Belafonte was also a supporter of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle agains apartheid forces there as well.

 Harry Belafonte was truly a man for who lived for justice and was a warrior against racism and colonialism, both within film, and on the streets.