Harry Belafonte

CTL-E-5962 · Person · musician · 1927–2023

VERIFIED evidence grade — master store (canonical CSV)

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-02644 · provenance: canonical master store (CSV), record CTL-P-0823 + build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-5962. Master record source: News seed 2026-10-16 (PEOPLE) — partially verified, see notes.

Harry Belafonte (born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr., March 1, 1927, Harlem, New York, to Jamaican immigrant parents; died April 25, 2023, New York City, of congestive heart failure, aged 96) was the singer and actor who carried calypso to the world and bankrolled the civil rights movement from inside it. Partly raised in Jamaica, he served in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War and trained at the Dramatic Workshop alongside Sidney Poitier. He won a Tony Award in 1954 for John Murray Anderson's Almanac, recorded for RCA Victor from the early 1950s, and his “Matilda” (1953) opened the calypso wave. His album Calypso (1956), home of “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” was the first LP by a single artist to sell one million copies and spent thirty-one weeks atop the Billboard chart; by 1959 he was the highest-paid Black performer in history. His films include Bright Road (1953), Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957), and a final appearance in BlacKkKlansman (2018). He was a close ally of Martin Luther King Jr. and a movement financier across six decades.

The record

• Also known as: Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.
• Known for: Singer, actor, civil rights activist; King of Calypso; first Black Emmy winner (1960)

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 2 — 747 Program, Wave 9; second Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Harry Belafonte entity in the live graph at 3,603 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-5962 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — corpus scan tail tranche, ranks #751–#1400 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #1066). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — era-defining singer-actor-activist; core scope, and a Dramatic Workshop cohort-mate of Sidney Poitier (CTL-E-5959) in this same packet. Vital status: DECEASED — died April 25, 2023, aged 96, of congestive heart failure (Smithsonian). Tribute treatment in the Curator's Judgment. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): Calypso (1956): first LP by a single artist to sell one million copies; 31 weeks atop the Billboard album chart (Smithsonian). A separate account credits the album with 99 weeks on the charts in total — a different measure (weeks charted vs. weeks at number one), carried as attributed, not blended. Tony Award 1954. Highest-paid Black performer in history by 1959 (Smithsonian). MEDIA: photo HELD (Harry Belafonte portrait, Calypso era named as candidate; no file-page verification in this pass); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-5962-harry-belafonte.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Non-place record; no map attaches at the entity layer.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map catalog (checked by name and variants), and no official/em) | audio = HELD (No recording with a CTL rights basis was staged in this pass.)

Relationships

• Following Harry — documented by
  STRONG EVIDENCE
• Jesse Williams — mentored
  STRONG EVIDENCE
• Tony Awards 1954 — honored by
  VERIFIED FACT

Sources

• Smithsonian Magazine, "Harry Belafonte, Groundbreaking Singer, Songwriter and Activist, Dies at 96" (April 2023) — the Smithsonian's obituary: the March 1, 1927 Harlem birth, the April 25, 2023 death, Calypso as the first million-selling LP by a single artist and its thirty-one weeks at number one, and the 1959 highest-paid standing — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/harry-belafonte-groundbreaking-singer-songwriter-and-activist-dies-at-96-180982051/ (primary source · build store)
• Legacy.com, notable deaths: Harry Belafonte (accessed 2026-10-16) — the obituary record confirming the death, the Navy service, the Dramatic Workshop years with Poitier, and the film chronology through BlacKkKlansman (2018) — https://www.legacy.com/legacy/notable-deaths/harry-belafonte (build store)
• https://www.tonyawards.com/winners/year/1954/category/any/show/any/ (verification source · master store)

Evidence note (master store)

Won Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical at the Tony Awards 1954 — per the official Tony Awards winners record (tonyawards.com), cross-checked on the per-year winners pages (fetched 2026-10-17)

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Record CTL-E-5962 · Combined Graph record U-02644 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 3 sources · 3 mapped relationships.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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