Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born on March 1, 1927 in Harlem. His father, who was born in Martinique (and later changed the family name), worked occasionally as a chef on merchant ships and was often away; his mother, Melvine (Amor) Bellanfanti, born in Jamaica, was a domestic.
In 1936, Harry, his mother and his younger brother, Dennis, moved to Jamaica. Unable to find work there, his mother soon returned to New York, leaving him and his brother in the care of relatives who, he later recalled, were either “unemployed or above the law.” They met her in Harlem in 1940.
Awakening to black history
Mr. Belafonte dropped out of George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy, where he was assigned to load ammunition aboard ships. Black peers introduced him to the works of WEB Du Bois and other African-American authors and urged him to study black history.
He received further encouragement from Marguerite Byrd, the daughter of a middle-class Washington family, whom he met while he was stationed in Virginia and she was studying psychology at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). They married in 1948.
He and Mrs. Byrd had two children, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte, who survive him, as do his two children with Mrs. Robinson, Gina Belafonte and David; and eight grandchildren. He and Ms Robinson divorced in 2004, and in 2008 he married Pamela Frank, a photographer. She also survives him, along with a stepdaughter, Sarah Frank; a stepson, Lindsey Frank; and three great-grandchildren.
