Happy birthday to 1927: Singer Harry Belafonte, who was born as Harold George Belafonte Junior to Jamaican father and Martinique mother (Both are in the Caribbean Islands to the south of US.) in the Harlem district of New York City, New York State, US. When his mother Melvine went back to Martinique from 1935 to 1940, he remained with her before they both returned to Harlem to attend George Washington High School. Here his dyslexia became apparent and he had to become a high school drop-out in an era when people simply assumed that he was stupid, because he was African blooded. With nothing better to do, at age 17 in 1944, he joined the navy until the regular discharge in 1945 before he returned to New York City to perform at the American Negro Theater and studying drama at the Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop, while also earning a living by singing at night clubs. His first television debut was in CBS African-American musical "Sugar Hill Times" in 1949 and also signing with Jubilee Record. At the time he was only learning US songs, but soon he learned of the folk music at the Library of Congress American folk song archive, where he discovered his root, the West Indies folk music. Accompanied by guitarist Millard Thomas, he began singing at the Village Vanguard jazz club. His Broadway debut was in 1954 with "John Murray Anderson's Almanac" where he sang the Caribbean song "The Banana Boat Song" that was recorded as the album "Calypso" (1956 by RCA) that not only became a million seller, but also caused a brief Jamaican folk music fad. He also became the first African-American perfomer to win a Tony Award in 1954 for that Broadway musical. He also appeared in the movie "Carmen Jones" (1953), based on Mary Elizabeth Vroman's "See How They Run" on the story of a British West Indies teacher that originally ran in the June 1951 issue of "The Ladies' Home Journal". The movie had only one white actor, Robert Horton, who played Dr. Mitchell. Harry played the school principal. Dorothy Dandridge played Jane Richards, the fourth grade teacher in southern US who had problem with the rebellious 11 years old pupil as played by Philip Herburn who has a fascination with a caterpillar as it turns into a coccoon. Now he likes another pupil Tanya as played by Barbara Ann Sanders who dies from pneumonia as the doctor watches helplessly. Later a swarm of bees invade the class and he finds the queen bee out of the class that leads the rest of the bees out to earn the principal's thanks. The story ends with the cocoon opening, that he presented not to the pupil who died but now to the teacher. It sounds like a story of a dyslexic pupil, although the only part that I can associate with the movie was that I once had bees swarming into my bed room. They found a way inside past the double window panes and the netting, and buzzing me when I awoke to find half-a-dozen flying inside, and the rest of the hundreds of bees swarming between the window panes. I didn't get stung either, although I don't remember how my father removed them. By 1956, his songs "Belafonte", "Jamaica Farewell", and "Banana Boat" were all hit songs. After "An Evening with Belafonte" (1957) became a hit, he decided to do a very controversial movie "Island in the Sun" (1957): The time is the 1950's. Place is some British Caribbean island. Harold is David Boyeur, a politically ambitious black skinned person who gets hot with a white Mavis Norman as played by white Joan Fontaine. (Whom you might remember as born on October 22, 1917 in Tokyo, Japan, as Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland who had some problems with her older sister Olivia de havilland, since Joan kept doing good acting despite their family which had no expectation for Joan.) It's still only slight over a decade when Japanese soldiers who surrendered during World War II were tortured, beheaded and then the skulls taken home as souvenirs while sea survivors were machine gunned, and only half-a-century since untold millions of Filipino boys aged 10 and above were killed like insects and the only reason why the Philippines wasn't completely depopulated of the "brown monkeys" and repopulated by Americans was because so many thousands of well-trained African-American soldiers who couldn't bear to see the boys tortured like themselves defected to the Filipino side. In US like that, this movie caused a huge commotion by its display of inter-racial kiss. Dorothy Dandridge played Margot Seaton, while Joan Collins (best remembered for playing Alexis Morrell in "Dynasty") played Jocelyn Fleury. The movie was very controversial back then, but now even African-American rapists kidnapping and killing white women isn't a big thing, as long as it's just a fictional movie. (But nothing tops reality, such as the white Canadian pig farmer who admitted to an undercover agent that he killed 49 white women. The testimonies are gruesome, with an eyewitness that she saw the guy placing a woman on a hook and then stripping her skin away, before feeding the remains to pigs -- similar thing happened in India, but at least the Indian police wasn't part of the cover-up so they fired the police who ignored the pleas to investigate from the families of the disappeared, unlike the pig farmer, whose case was covered-up by the Canadian police for two decades and none of them was fired after it became public. Skinning captives was also what the Afghans did to Russian soldiers when Russia invaded Afghanistan, which was why Vladimir Putin was happy to help US invade and destroy Afghanistan.) He also did singing tours in Europe in 1958, although he refused to tour the southern states of SU from 1954 to 1961 because the crowds were racially segregated. He also created his production company, Harel, in 1959, to produce television shows and movies on African-Americans. But the movies such as "Odds Against Tomorrow" (1959) didn't make it very big, and why should it? The mainly white audience is told that they're bad and evil. Although his movies didn't do well, he continued to produce records such as "Jump up Calypso" (1961) and "The Midnight Special" (1962). But they soon disappeared from the charts when The Beatles came from Britain. "Belafonte at the Greek Theater" (1964) was the last to enter the Top 40 list. The songs to follow had trouble making the Top 100. It was also many years before he went back to producing a movie with "The Angel Levine" (1970) where he played the angel Alexander Levine who comes to help the poor and elderly New York Jewish tailor Morris Mishkin as played by Zero Mostel who's in too much pain to even buy medicine for his sick wife Fanny as played by Ida Kaminska. But Morris remember seeing Alexander as a thief escaping through traffic and getting killed, and how that thief is back and claims to be a black Jew. But once Alexander recite the Hebrew prayer for bread perfectly, Morris calms down. Fanny seems to improve dramatically whenever he's around, but Morris still thinks that this black Jew is a mental case. I remember seeing it on television before I knew whom Harold was, and only interested in what someone with a name like "Zero" looks like. Besides other movies to follow such as "Buck and the Preacher" (1972) and "Uptown Saturday Night" (1974), Harold spent his time on humanitarian works, such as organization of the USA for Africa, and also one of the singers for the "We Are the World" song in 1985. In 1986, he replaced Danny Kay (real name David Daniel Kaminski) as the UNICEF's Goodwill Ambassador and chaired the welcoming committee for Nelson Mandela's visit to US in 1988. Except for cameo in two movies "The Player" (1992) and "Ready to Wear" (1992), he didn't go back to appearing in movies until Japanese-American director-writer Desmond Nakano directed/written "White Man's Burden" (1995) with Harold as See's Candies factory owner Thaddeus Thomas and John Travolta of "Saturday Night Live" and "Welcome Back Kotter" as Louis Pinnock, the honest and hard-working See's Candies factory worker with impeccable work record. One day, Louis goes to his boss' home to deliver a package, but inadvertently looks at the boss' naked African-American wife. But this is an upside-down world, where African-Americans poke fun at the intellectually inferior whites, where television stars and news casters are all African-American. That small peeping-tom event should have been nothing but a small misunderstanding for Louis, but because his white skin is the color of the lowest man on the totem pole, he goes down and faces the horrors that await him. Harold is still active in his humanitarianwork, and also the founding member of the Institute for Non-violence, which is as far from current US foreign policy as it gets, when US has decimated Afghanistan and Iraq, and preparing to do likewise to Iran under the pretext that iran may make nuclear missiles in the coming decade, while ignoring the immediate threat from North Korea which already detonated an atomic device, which is under the nuclear umbrella of mainland China that threatened to destroy hundreds of US cities and towns, and which still celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This is the same China that US view as its ally who should not be offended, even though the same China isn't threatening to destroy Japan, celebrate every major tragedy in Japan, nor do anything much no matter how Japan offends China. If after all this, North Korea with Chinese help rains destruction upon US, then US got everything it deserves. There's no need to show pity and give a heart.

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