Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, along with singer Harry Belafonte, half of an interracial power couple who used their high profile to aid the civil rights movement and the cause of integration in the United States, died March 9 in The Angels. . She was 95 years old.
His family announced his death at an assisted living facility in the Studio City neighborhood. She had resided there for the past year and nine months after living for decades in Manhattan.
Belafonte, who was white and the second wife of Belafonte, the black Caribbean American artist and activist, had an eclectic career in the arts. At various times she was a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, actress and documentary producer.
Ms. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world with her husband and children during Mr. Belafonte's sold-out concert tours in the late 1950s and 1960s, presenting a picture of a close-knit interracial family that otherwise It was rarely seen on television or in the newspapers. and magazines.
He was at Mr. Belafonte's side as they planned and organized fundraisers for civil rights groups, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Belafonte died last April at age 96, and during a memorial service in his honor on March 1, at Riverside Church in Manhattan, his son, David Belafonte, remembered Mrs. Belafonte's efforts. “She marched, she endured racial hatred and abuse over the years,” she told the crowd, “when a high-profile relationship between a black man and a white woman was seriously risky business.”
Julia Mary Robinson was born on September 14, 1928 in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, the daughter of Clara and George Robinson, who had Russian Jewish roots. She was raised in what she called “an interracial environment,” raised by liberal parents, and attended school with white and black children, she told Redbook magazine in 1958. She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now Manhattan High School of Music and Art). Ella fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), where she was an art student.
Around age 16, Ms. Robinson won a scholarship to the newly opened Katherine Dunham School of Dance in Manhattan and dropped out of high school to pursue a dance career. She (she Later she obtained the General Education Diploma from her). She soon rose to become a student teacher at the school; Among her students were Marlon Brando and Alvin Ailey, who would gain fame as a dancer, choreographer and director.
When a vacancy arose in Dunham's renowned all-black dance company in the mid-1940s, Robinson auditioned in Philadelphia and was hired as its first white member.
“I never thought I would join her company,” she recalled in an interview with the New York radio station WBAI in 2015, “but I knew she was a good dancer.”
Ms. Robinson, recognizable by her dark eyes, olive skin and black hair, which she wore in a distinctive ponytail or pigtails that fell almost to her waist, toured the world with Dunham's dancers, sometimes sharing a room with her fellow dancer Eartha Kitt. before Ms. Kitt became a celebrated singer and actress.
When the company was banned from hotels because of its race, a not uncommon occurrence in the United States and abroad, Ms. Robinson insisted on staying wherever the other dancers were staying. She remained with the company for seven years.
By the early 1950s, his parents had moved to Los Angeles and Robinson ended up in Hollywood, where he helped choreograph dance sequences in at least one film and then landed small roles in a few others, including “Things,” a 1954 drama set in Italy and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, and “Lust for Life,” the 1956 film biography of Vincent van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. By then she was already called Julie instead of Julia.
She met Mr. Belafonte on the set of the 1954 musical film. “Carmen Jones” in which he starred opposite Dorothy Dandridge, hosted by Mr. Brando, a good friend of Mr. Belafonte. She had dated Mr. Brando off and on for several years after appearing with him in a touring production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Robinson and Belafonte became lovers, although Belafonte was still married to Margurite Belafonte, a black teacher and psychologist. He and Margurite (her first name also appeared as Marguerite) separated soon afterward, although in public they maintained the trappings of a happy marriage for the sake of his soaring career.
Their marriage ended in divorce, in Las Vegas, in February 1957. Eight days later, Belafonte, about to turn 30, and Robinson, who was pregnant at 28, married in Mexico, Belafonte wrote in his 2011 book . , “My song: a memoir of art, race and defiance.”
They had initially tried to keep the marriage a secret to protect Belafonte's two young daughters, Adrienne and Shari, with his first wife, he wrote. But white gossip columnists and the black press followed suit, forcing their publicist to announce the marriage.
Interracial marriage was rare in the United States at the time (half of the states still legally prohibited it) and the fact that Belafonte had divorced a black woman and so quickly married a white woman smacked of scandal. While the liberal entertainment circles to which the Belafontes traveled largely accepted the union, Belafonte faced harsh criticism elsewhere, especially in the black press, where some columnists disparaged him as a rich and successful black man who was no longer around. happy with a black wife. .
Belafonte, by then a well-known advocate of civil rights and integration, took to the pages of Ebony, the leading African-American magazine, to write an essay proclaiming that race had nothing to do with marriage. “I believe in integration and work for it with all my heart and soul,” he wrote. “But I didn't marry Julie Robinson to advance the cause of integration. I married her because I was in love with her and she married me because she was in love with me.”
The commotion eventually died down and Belafonte put his career aside to start a family in Manhattan. But racial animosity still haunted them. When her first child, David, was born in the fall of 1957, Mrs. Belafonte received racist hate letters. “My first child,” she recalled in the WBAI interview. “You can imagine?”
For months, the Belafontes were unable to get a larger apartment in Manhattan because landlords and real estate agents refused to rent it to an interracial couple, a situation that made headlines. They eventually found an apartment on West End Avenue, where they lived for decades.
Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the family was frequently photographed arriving at airports during concert tours, taking vacations, or posing for newspaper and magazine profiles, helping to destigmatize interracial marriage in the United States.
As Belafonte's role in the civil rights movement deepened, so did Belafonte's. He planned fundraisers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also known as SNCC, hosting events at his home and in hotels for New York's liberal wealthy class. She founded, with actress Diahann Carroll, the so-called women's division of SNCC, and remained with the organization even after it began to fall out of favor with many white Americans during the Black Power era.
At the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, in which both Belafontes participated, it was Mrs. Belafonte who told the orange-clad private security forces that the ordinary citizens of Selma deserved to be at the forefront of the march, ahead of the celebrities and dignitaries, and that is where they were placed.
During her 50 years of marriage to Belafonte, she participated with him in strategic meetings with Dr. King in the couple's apartment, dined with presidents at the White House and with foreign leaders abroad, including Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. At a time when Cuba and the United States had no official channels of communication, she passed messages from the Havana government to American officials, according to a declassified State Department memo.
Belafonte separated her own causes from those of her husband; In one case she helped organize, with Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's wife, a women's march against the Vietnam War in Washington in January 1968. Before the event, she placed an ad in The New York Times asking women women who “Make political power out of feminine power.”
She occasionally joined Mr. Belafonte's tours as a dancer, and when her children grew up, she acted in a few more films, including “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which she appeared with Mr. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier (who directed) as the wife of an Indian chief, earning her critical acclaim. She had learned a Native American dialect for the role.
The Belafontes divorced in 2007, and Ms. Belafonte kept a lower profile thereafter. In his last years he produced two documentaries: “Ritmo del Fuego” (2006), about the African cultural heritage in Cuba and the Caribbean, and “Flags, Feathers and Lies” (2009), about the resilience of the Indian Mardi Gras tradition. in New Orleans.
Following the death of Margurite Belafonte Mazique in 1998, Mrs. Belafonte assumed the role of family matriarch, not only for her own children but also for those of Mr. Belafonte's first marriage, Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte. She is survived by all of her children, as well as three grandchildren.
“She was a real type aggregator and created an atmosphere of diversity that was our home growing up,” David Belafonte said in an interview. “She opened the house to just a group of people; it was amazing. And Julie was the social glue that held all of that together. “There wasn’t a person too big or too small that she didn’t hug and make feel part of the team.”
