Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with the singer Harry Belafonte, half of an interracial energy couple who used their excessive profiles to help the civil rights motion and the reason for integration in america, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95.
Her loss of life, at an assisted dwelling facility within the Studio Metropolis neighborhood, was introduced by her household. She had resided there for the final yr and 9 months after dwelling for many years in Manhattan.
Ms. Belafonte, who was white and the second spouse of Mr. Belafonte, the Black Caribbean American entertainer and activist, had an eclectic profession within the arts. At numerous instances she was a dancer, a choreographer, a dance instructor, an actress and a documentary movie producer.
Ms. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world along with her husband and their kids throughout Mr. Belafonte’s sold-out live performance excursions within the late Nineteen Fifties and ’60s, presenting a picture of a detailed interracial household that was in any other case hardly ever seen on tv or in newspapers and magazines.
She was at Mr. Belafonte’s aspect after they deliberate and hosted fund-raisers for civil rights teams, together with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Management Convention and the extra militant Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Mr. Belafonte died final April at 96, and through a memorial service for him on March 1, at Riverside Church in Manhattan, Ms. Belafonte’s efforts had been remembered by their son, David Belafonte. “She marched, she endured racial hatred and abuse by means of the years,” he informed the gang, “when a high-profile relationship between a Black man and a white lady was significantly dangerous enterprise.”
Julia Mary Robinson was born on Sept. 14, 1928, within the Washington Heights part of Manhattan to Clara and George Robinson, each of whom had Russian Jewish roots. She was raised in what she referred to as “an interracial atmosphere,” reared by liberal mother and father and going to high school with each Black and white kids, she informed the journal Redbook in 1958. She attended the Excessive College of Music and Artwork in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia Excessive College of Music & Artwork and Performing Arts), the place she was an artwork pupil.
Across the age of 16, Ms. Robinson received a scholarship to the newly opened Katherine Dunham College of Dance in Manhattan and dropped out of highschool to pursue a dance profession. (She later earned her Basic Schooling Diploma.) She quickly labored her method as much as student-teacher on the college; amongst her college students had been Marlon Brando and Alvin Ailey, who was to achieve fame as a dancer, choreographer and director.
When a gap got here up at Ms. Dunham’s famend all-Black dance firm within the mid-Forties, Ms. Robinson auditioned in Philadelphia and was employed as its first white member.
“I by no means thought she’d combine her firm,” she recalled in an interview with the New York radio station WBAI in 2015, “however I knew I used to be a great dancer.”
Ms. Robinson, recognizable for her darkish eyes, olive pores and skin and black hair, which she wore in a particular ponytail or in pigtails that fell almost to her waist, toured the world with the Dunham dancers, generally rooming along with her fellow dancer Eartha Kitt, earlier than Ms. Kitt grew to become a celebrated singer and actress.
When the corporate was barred from motels due to race, a not rare prevalence in america and overseas, Ms. Robinson insisted on staying wherever the opposite dancers stayed. She remained with the corporate for seven years.
By the early Nineteen Fifties, her mother and father had moved to Los Angeles, and Ms. Robinson wound up in Hollywood, serving to to choreograph dance sequences in not less than one movie and later acquiring small components in a couple of others, together with “Mambo,” a 1954 drama set in Italy and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, and “Lust for Life,” the 1956 movie biography of Vincent van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. By then she was going by Julie slightly than Julia.
She met Mr. Belafonte on the set of the 1954 film musical “Carmen Jones,” through which he starred reverse Dorothy Dandridge, launched to him by Mr. Brando, a great good friend of Mr. Belafonte’s. She had dated Mr. Brando on and off for a number of years after showing with him in a touring manufacturing of “A Streetcar Named Need.”
Ms. Robinson and Mr. Belafonte grew to become lovers, though Mr. Belafonte was nonetheless married to Margurite Belafonte, a Black schoolteacher and psychologist. He and Margurite (her given title has additionally appeared as Marguerite) separated shortly after, although in public they maintained the trimmings of a contented marriage for the sake of his skyrocketing profession.
Their marriage led to divorce, in Las Vegas, in February 1957. Eight days later, Mr. Belafonte, about to show 30, and Ms. Robinson, who was pregnant at 28, married in Mexico, Mr. Belafonte wrote in his 2011 e-book, “My Music: A Memoir of Artwork, Race, and Defiance.”
They’d sought at first to maintain the wedding a secret to guard Mr. Belafonte’s two younger daughters, Adrienne and Shari, together with his first spouse, he wrote. However white gossip columnists and the Black press had been scorching on their path, forcing his publicist to announce the wedding.
Interracial marriage was unusual in America then — half the states nonetheless legally barred it — and the truth that Mr. Belafonte had divorced a Black lady and so shortly married a white one carried the whiff of scandal. Whereas the liberal leisure circles through which the Belafontes traveled largely accepted the union, Mr. Belafonte confronted harsh criticism elsewhere, particularly within the Black press, the place some columnists disparaged him as a wealthy, profitable Black man who was not content material with a Black spouse.
Mr. Belafonte, by then a widely known supporter of civil rights and integration, took to the pages of Ebony, the main African American journal, to jot down an essay proclaiming that race had nothing to do with the wedding. “I imagine in integration and work for it with all my coronary heart and soul,” he wrote. “However I didn’t marry Julie Robinson to additional the reason for integration. I married her as a result of I used to be in love along with her and she or he married me as a result of she was in love with me.”
The commotion finally died down, and Ms. Belafonte put her profession apart to start out a household in Manhattan. However racial animus nonetheless trailed them. When their first little one, David, was born within the fall of 1957, Ms. Belafonte acquired racist hate letters. “My first little one,” she recalled within the WBAI interview. “Are you able to think about?”
For months the Belafontes had been unable to acquire a bigger residence in Manhattan as a result of landlords and actual property brokers refused to hire to an interracial couple, a predicament that made headlines. They finally discovered an residence on West Finish Avenue, the place they lived for many years.
Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the household was ceaselessly photographed as they arrived at airports throughout live performance excursions, took holidays or posed for newspaper and journal profiles, serving to to destigmatize interracial marriage in america.
As Mr. Belafonte’s function within the civil rights motion deepened, so did Ms. Belafonte’s. She deliberate fund-raisers for the Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, often known as SNCC, internet hosting occasions at their dwelling and at motels for New York’s liberal moneyed class. She based, with the actress Diahann Carroll, SNCC’s so-called girls’s division, and caught with the group even after it started to lose favor amongst many white Individuals through the Black Energy period.
On the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, through which each Belafontes participated, it was Ms. Belafonte who informed orange-jacketed non-public safety forces that the unusual residents of Selma deserved to be on the entrance of it, forward of the celebrities and dignitaries, and that’s the place they had been positioned.
Throughout her 50-year marriage to Mr. Belafonte, she sat in with him on technique conferences with Dr. King on the couple’s residence, dined with presidents on the White Home and with overseas leaders overseas, together with Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. At a time when Cuba and america had no official channels of communication, she handed messages from the federal government in Havana to American officers, in keeping with a declassified State Division memo.
Ms. Belafonte pushed her personal causes other than her husband’s; in a single case she helped to prepare, with Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s spouse, a girls’s march in opposition to the Vietnam Conflict in Washington in January 1968. Prematurely of the occasion she positioned an advert in The New York Occasions asking girls to “Make Womanpower Political Energy.”
She often joined Mr. Belafonte’s excursions as a dancer and, when their kids had been older, acted in a couple of extra motion pictures, together with “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), through which she appeared with Mr. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier (who directed) because the spouse of an Indian chief, incomes important reward. She had realized a Native American dialect for the function.
The Belafontes divorced in 2007, and Ms. Belafonte saved a decrease profile thereafter. In her later years she produced two documentaries: “Ritmo del Fuego” (2006), about African cultural heritage in Cuba and the Caribbean, and “Flags, Feathers and Lies” (2009), concerning the resilience of the Mardi Gras Indian custom in New Orleans.
Following Margurite Belafonte Mazique’s loss of life in 1998, Ms. Belafonte assumed the function of household matriarch, not solely to her personal kids however to these from Mr. Belafonte’s first marriage, Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte. The entire kids survive her, in addition to three grandchildren.
“She was an actual aggregator of varieties and created an environment of range that was our dwelling rising up,” David Belafonte mentioned in an interview. “She opened the house to only a bouquet of individuals — it was staggering. And Julie was the social glue that held that stuff collectively. There was no particular person too massive or too small whom she wouldn’t wrap her arms round and make them really feel like they had been a part of the crew.”
