Harry Belafonte, singer, actor and rights campaigner, dies at age 96

Harry Belafonte, a singer, songwriter and groundbreaking actor who started his entertainment career belting "Day O" in his 1950s hit song "Banana Boat" before turning to political activism, has died at the age of 96.

Belafonte died of congestive heart failure at his home in New York on Tuesday with his wife Pamela by his side, the firm of his longtime spokesperson Ken Sunshine said in a statement.

As a Black leading man who explored racial themes in 1950s movies, Belafonte would later move on to working with his friend Martin Luther King Jr. during the U.S. civil rights movement in the early 1960s. He became the driving force behind the celebrity-studded, famine-fighting hit song "We Are the World" in the 1980s.

Belafonte once said he was in a constant state of rebellion that was driven by anger.

"I've got to be a part of whatever the rebellion is that tries to change all this," he told the New York Times in 2001. "The anger is a necessary fuel. Rebellion is healthy."

Belafonte was born in New York City's borough of Manhattan but spent his early childhood in his family's native Jamaica. Handsome and suave, he came to be known as the "King of Calypso" early in his career. He was the first Black person allowed to perform in many plush nightspots and also had racial breakthroughs in movies at a time when segregation prevailed in much of the United States.

In "Island in the Sun" in 1954 his character entertained notions of a relationship with a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, which reportedly triggered threats to burn down theaters in the American South. In 1959's "Odds Against Tomorrow" Belafonte played a bank robber with a racist partner.

In the 1960s he campaigned with King, and in the 1980s, he worked to end apartheid in South Africa and coordinated Nelson Mandela's first visit to the United States.