Daylight Come

Harry Belafonte is still all over the culture years after his death. His songs turn up at weddings and ballgames: "Day-O," "Jump in the Line," "Jamaica Farewell." Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's biography sets out to explain how a Harlem-born son of Caribbean immigrants came to take the folk music of the islands and make it American pop, and how that music helped fix a lasting picture of Caribbean life, one that still underpins a huge tourist industry.

The list of firsts is long. Belafonte put out the first LP in history to sell a million copies. He was the first Black movie star in America, the first Black producer of a prime-time network TV special, and the first Black winner of an Emmy. At one point he was the highest-paid Black performer ever, and audiences of every background loved him, even under segregation. Yet his work on stage and screen was only half of his influence, because his activism also changed the direction of American history.

Jelly-Schapiro follows Belafonte from poverty to fame and from Harlem to Jamaica to the March on Washington. Along the way he looks at the lifelong bond with Sidney Poitier, the friendship with Fidel Castro, the work alongside Nelson Mandela, and the therapy, at times startling, that a painful childhood made necessary. The core of the story is Belafonte's tie to Martin Luther King Jr., whose cause he backed for the rest of his life, a devotion that helped countless people and cost him personally.

The result is a portrait of an American icon and an inquiry into authenticity, celebrity, and conviction.