“The most powerful weapon that we have in the universe is the weapon of art,” Harry Belafonte told a social-activist teen theater troupe in Harlem in 2014. Like few other stars, Belafonte leveraged his talent, fame, and fortune to serve his human-rights activism. His most popular song, “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” was about the plight of third-world dockworkers. He was a celebrated actor onstage, on-screen, and on TV, but his performances were always done with an eye toward how he could help the cause. He retired from performing as he entered his ninth decade but never halted his activism until his death on April 24 at the age of 96, as reported by The New York Times.

He was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in Harlem on March 1, 1927, the son of West Indian parents who were both immigrants. His father, who was from Martinique, had been a cook in the British Royal Navy. His mother, a housemaid, was from Jamaica. Fearing that Harry was already turning into a delinquent at age nine she sent him to live with his grandmother in Jamaica from 1936 to 1939.

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Back in New York, Harry dropped out of school in the ninth grade and enlisted in the Navy at 17, serving as a munitions loader in the waning days of World War II. Working in New York as an assistant janitor, he finally found direction when he received, as a tip, a ticket to the American Negro Theater’s production of Home Is the Hunter. The play inspired him to join the A.N.T., where he met lifelong friend and fellow West Indian Sidney Poitier. On the G.I. Bill, he also studied drama at Manhattan’s New School, where his classmates included Poitier, Marlon Brando, and Tony Curtis.

With roles scarce for black actors, Belafonte found regular work as a singer. His musical career would eventually encompass every form of African-American popular music, from blues to gospel to hip-hop. He began as a jazz singer, backed by no less than bebop titans Charlie Parker and Max Roach, but he found fame singing folk songs he had learned from the archives of the Library of Congress. An engagement at the legendary Village Vanguard led to both a Broadway appearance in the 1953 musical revue John Murray Anderson’s Almanac—making him the first black actor to win a Tony—and a record contract with RCA.

His 1956 album Calypso was the first LP by an individual artist to sell 1 million copies (it was technically the first to go platinum, though the certification wouldn’t be introduced until two decades later) and is widely credited with launching a vogue for the Trinidadian music of the same name. The album led off with what would become Belafonte’s signature tune, “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” a Jamaican work song sung by night-shift fruit loaders. Other Belafonte hits of the era included “Matilda,” “Jump in the Line,” and “Jamaica Farewell.”

He won two Grammys for his folk recordings (and years later, in 2000, a Grammy lifetime-achievement award). Popular with both white and black audiences, Belafonte made a point of refusing to perform in the Jim Crow South, maintaining the embargo from 1954 to 1961.

After Poitier, Belafonte became the only other black leading man in Hollywood in the 1950s. He starred opposite Dorothy Dandridge in the all-black musical Carmen Jones (1954), though, incredibly, he did not get to sing in the film. (He was deemed not “operatic” enough to sing the film’s music, adapted from Georges Bizet’s Carmen, so he only lip-synched.)

His other films of the 1950s included Bright Road, Island in the Sun (which raised eyebrows with its hint of a thwarted inter-racial romance between the characters played by Belafonte and Joan Fontaine), Odds Against Tomorrow (the first film from Belafonte’s company Harbel, the first black-run production shingle in Hollywood), and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. He conquered TV, too, with a 1959 special, Tonight with Belafonte with The Revlon Revue, which made him the first African-American to win an Emmy.

His success in Hollywood during those years of McCarthyism was even more impressive considering that he’d briefly been blacklisted, having been a protégé of and opening act for singer and openly communist activist Paul Robeson and having often appeared at rallies for progressive causes. Belafonte denied having been a member of the Communist Party, and stalwart anti-communist Ed Sullivan vouched for him by booking Belafonte to sing several times on his popular TV show. Still, his socialist worldview was always apparent and something for which he never apologized. “Harry Belafonte was radical long before it was chic,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. once said, “and remained so long after it wasn’t.”

In the 1960s, Belafonte gave career boosts to such singer-activists as South Africa’s Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, as well as Minnesota’s Bob Dylan, whose first released recording was as a harmonica player on Belafonte’s Midnight Special album (1962). But he spent much of the 1960s actively engaged in the Civil Rights movement.

From 1956 on, he was a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr., whose bail he paid when King was jailed in Birmingham and whose meager preacher’s salary he helped subsidize. He helped finance the Freedom Rides, was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington, and helped round up Hollywood talent for the occasion, including Brando and Charlton Heston.

In 1964, he and Poitier risked their lives to bring $70,000 in cash to voter-registration activists in Mississippi after three of their volunteers had been murdered there. He participated in the Selma march in 1965, along with his Hollywood pal Anthony Perkins. “Harry motivated Martin,” Coretta Scott King said years later, “because he was a man who didn’t have to get involved, and who did.” He and Petula Clark also inadvertently broke new ground when the white, British singer touched Belafonte’s arm during a TV taping in 1968—a moment that both caused a scandal and became an inter-racial cause célèbre.

Belafonte spent the 1970s performing around the world. He seldom made movies anymore, though he did star in two films directed by Poitier, the western Buck and the Preacher and the Harlem-set comedy Uptown Saturday Night. He helped hip-hop go mainstream by producing and scoring the landmark 1984 movie Beat Street and co-producing its hit soundtrack album with Arthur Baker. He was the driving force behind 1985’s “USA for Africa” and it’s all-star fundraising-for-famine single, ”We Are the World.” In 1987, he became only the second American to be named a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF.

Belafonte continued to bring attention to the anti-apartheid cause he’d championed for three decades, releasing “Paradise in Gazankulu,” an album of South African music, in 1988, and heading the welcoming committee for Nelson Mandela when the freed African National Congress leader toured the United States in 1990. The 80s also saw a new generation introduced to Belafonte’s classic hits with their prominent use in Tim Burton’s movie Beetlejuice (1988).

In the 2000s, his career wound down. His final movie role was as a chess-playing old-timer at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the day Robert F. Kennedy was killed there, in 2006’s Bobby. (In real life, Belafonte had known R.F.K. well enough to call him by the titular nickname.) In 2007, as he turned 80, he announced his retirement from performing. The next year, he married photographer Pamela Frank, his third wife. (He'd been married to teacher Marguerite Byrd from 1948 to 1957 and to dancer Julie Robinson from 1957 to 2004. He fathered four children, including actresses Shari and Gina Belafonte.)

“I tried to envision playing out the rest of my life devoted almost exclusively to reflection,” he said in those years, “but there’s just too much in the world to be done.” Indeed, he continued to make headlines throughout the decade with his controversial remarks condemning the George W. Bush administration. He likened secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell to “house slaves,” called President Bush a terrorist, and likened the Department of Homeland Security to the Gestapo.

Belafonte was far from finished making public appearances and agitating. He appeared in an autobiographical documentary, Sing Your Song, and wrote a memoir, My Song, in 2011. In late 2014, he appeared on the PBS series Speakeasy, interviewing Carlos Santana, as the guitarist’s hand-picked interviewer. In 2015, he became one of a handful of entertainers to complete the rare EGOT grand slam when he added to his Emmy, Grammy, and Tony wins an honorary Oscar.

Fittingly, it was the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and he marked the occasion with a widely admired speech noting the highs and lows of Hollywood’s depiction of people of color in the century since The Birth of a Nation. Until his death, he maintained an active presence on Twitter and Facebook, posting pictures and videos of his recent appearances at philanthropic events and linking to external activism sites.

What motivated him all those years—both in the forging of his art and in his use of it as a weapon for justice—was anger. As he wrote in My Song, he never forgot the anger he’d felt as a boy growing up poor and feeling out of place in both New York and Jamaica. “Yet why this little boy, among all others, should use his anger to push himself up, make a name for himself, and then make it his mission to smash racial barriers and injustice with such grim determination, I’m not sure I can say,” Belafonte wrote. “Perhaps, in the end, where your anger comes from is less important than what you do with it.”

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Harry Belafonte—Singer, Actor, and Activist—Has Died at 96