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  • Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical by Judith E. Smith
  • Edward Schmitt
Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical. By Judith E. Smith. Discovering America. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Pp. xvi, 352. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-292-72914-8.)

In Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical, Judith E. Smith examines the emergence and career of Harry Belafonte from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Belafonte was as popular as any entertainer in the country through much of this period, with a reach that extended into television, films, and most prominently, music. Smith portrays Belafonte as uniquely consistent and determined in his efforts to combine art and activism. Much of the book is focused on the difficult artistic and strategic choices Belafonte faced in deploying his growing influence while navigating the racial restrictions of the Cold War era.

The book is structured as a conventional biography, but Smith delves into intimate matters only insofar as she discerns their impact on Belafonte’s evolution as an artist. She elucidates the ways his difficult childhood split between Harlem and Jamaica influenced his eventual identity as a singer of calypso and work songs, and she demonstrates how the community of black and progressive artist-activists in New York became a surrogate family to Belafonte, shaping the vision of interracial community that guided his work throughout his career. Smith effectively situates Belafonte’s challenges and contributions within the larger networks of artist-activists who were his predecessors and peers, including the well-known Paul Robeson and less recognizable figures such as the Trinidad-born calypso artist Lord Invader. Smith’s discussion of postwar folk music—and the ways Belafonte helped shape that emerging genre—is particularly noteworthy.

Several aspects of the book broaden our understanding of Belafonte’s role in the civil rights movement. One is the pivotal role Belafonte played in what [End Page 218] are often considered the fallow years of the late 1950s. Smith insightfully contends that two mass youth marches for school integration that Belafonte helped lead “provided the seedbed for the new student-led phase of civil rights” and “indelibly linked him with the student movement” (p. 167). The more extensive contribution is Smith’s careful portrayal of Belafonte’s efforts to communicate the black experience to white audiences, perhaps most powerfully through his television specials.

The book’s considerable strength is Smith’s careful depiction of the decisions and constraints Belafonte faced as a powerful cultural figure. Less effective—and, in fairness, a much harder task—is Smith’s analysis of Belafonte’s impact as an artist-activist. While Smith notes record and box office sales, her primary formula is surveying reviews of Belafonte’s work in trade publications, mainstream newspapers, and the rather undifferentiated black press. Smith’s carefully distilled summaries offer episodic windows into critical reception and generalized differences between elite white and black perceptions, but there is no ultimate assessment of their significance. Also problematically, particularly given her convincing rendering of an artist striving passionately to represent the lives of those excluded because of race and class, the views held by ordinary African Americans and working people toward Belafonte’s efforts are not sufficiently addressed.

These limitations notwithstanding, Becoming Belafonte is a well-written, industriously researched study that is a valuable contribution to the historiography of both the black freedom struggle and popular culture in the pivotal postwar years.

Edward Schmitt
University of Wisconsin–Parkside
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