{"id":6798,"date":"2023-04-29T17:47:57","date_gmt":"2023-04-29T17:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=6798"},"modified":"2023-05-03T23:06:48","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T23:06:48","slug":"harry-belafonte-singer-actor-and-humanitarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/?p=6798","title":{"rendered":"Harry Belafonte &#8211; Singer, Actor and Humanitarian"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Harry Belafonte was a Jamaican-American singer, actor and activist who won three Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, an Emmy Award, and a Tony Award and starred in several Hollywood films. Above all, he was a humanitarian who took the sides of the downtrodden and advocated the most good for the most people. At age 94, he hosted a star-studded party to raise money for &#8220;<em>The Gathering for Justice<\/em>,&#8221; a social justice organization he founded in 2005.<\/p>\n<p>On April 25, 2023 at age 96, he died from congestive heart failure at his Manhattan home.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Early Life and Ground-Breaking Career<\/strong><br \/>\nBelafonte was born on March 1, 1927 in Harlem of Jamaican-born parents. From 1932 to 1940, Belafonte lived in Jamaica with one of his grandmothers. He returned to New York City where he went to high school and then served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Back in New York City, he became involved with the American Negro Theater and took acting classes at The New School. His singing career began when he sang in clubs to help pay for his acting classes. He signed a recording contract with RCA Victor in 1953, and had his first popular single that year with &#8220;Matilda.&#8221; In 1956, his album &#8220;Calypso&#8221; became the first LP in the world to sell more than one million copies in a year.<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/RoJ_0H3vXr0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<strong>Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement<\/strong><br \/>\nIn 1953, when Martin Luther King was 24 years old and Belafonte was 26, Belafonte began to raise money for King. During the 1963 Birmingham marches, Belafonte bailed King out of the Birmingham City Jail and raised $50,000 to release other civil rights protesters. He contributed to the 1961 Freedom Rides, supported voter registration drives, and helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington. During the &#8220;Mississippi Freedom Summer&#8221; of 1964, Belafonte and his close friend, <a href=\"_wp_link_placeholder\" data-wplink-edit=\"true\">Sydney Poitier<\/a>, flew to rallies in Mississippi and spent more than $60,000 to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.\u00a0\u00a0When Belafonte was in his early twenties, he met and worked with his idol and mentor, <a href=\"https:\/\/drmirkin.com\/histories-and-mysteries\/paul-robeson-voice-of-the-downtrodden.html\">Paul Robeson<\/a>, the world-famous concert singer, stage and film actor, professional football player, and an incredibly courageous political activist.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A Lifetime of Humanism<\/strong><br \/>\n\u2022 From 1987 until his death, Belafonte was a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.<br \/>\n\u2022 He was the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) celebrity ambassador for juvenile justice.<br \/>\n\u2022 In 1985, he helped organize the Grammy Award-winning song &#8220;We Are the World&#8221;, to<br \/>\nraise funds for Africa.<br \/>\n\u2022 In 1987, he received an appointment to UNICEF as a goodwill ambassador and travelled to Dakar, Senegal, where he served as chairman of the International Symposium of Artists and Intellectuals for African Children.<br \/>\n\u2022 In 2001, he worked in South Africa to support the campaign against HIV\/AIDS.<br \/>\n\u2022 In 2004, he went to Kenya to help educate children<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eBWe3dx4wtc\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<strong>Health Issues<\/strong><br \/>\nIn 1990, at age 63, Belafonte had to cancel a show because of chest pain. In 1996, at age 69, he had surgery to remove a prostate cancer. I have never seen his medical records, but up to 50 percent of North American men will develop prostate cancer if they live long enough (<em>Curr Oncol,<\/em> Feb 2015;22(1):1012).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shared Risk Factors for Heart Failure and Prostate Cancer<\/strong><br \/>\nMen who get prostate cancer usually die from something else rather than from the cancer \u2014 most often a heart attack or heart failure. In one large study, more than half of prostate cancer patients suffered from uncontrolled risk factors for heart attacks (<em>JAMA Netw Open<\/em>, Feb 24, 2021;4(2):e210070). Common laboratory indicators of both heart attack and prostate cancer risk include:<br \/>\n\u2022 blood pressure higher than 140\/90 mm Hg<br \/>\n\u2022 LDL cholesterol higher than 130 mg\/dL<br \/>\n\u2022 hemoglobin A1c (an indicator of diabetes) over 5.7<br \/>\n\u2022 alcohol use<br \/>\n\u2022 high blood homocysteine<br \/>\n\u2022 excess fat in the liver<br \/>\n\u2022 lack of exercise<br \/>\n\u2022 unhealthful diet<br \/>\nThe 10-year risk for people developing cancer or heart attacks with an unhealthful lifestyle was 40 percent for men and 25 percent for women, compared to 30 percent for the men and 18 percent for the women with healthful lifestyles (<em>BMC Medicine<\/em>, Jan 15, 2020;18(5)). The risks are even higher for black men.\u00a0 In 2022, Belafonte lost his life-long friend Sidney Poitier, who had both heart failure and prostate cancer.<\/p>\n<p>All men should be told that the American Cancer Society and the American Urologic Association recommend that anyone with prostate cancer should be checked for heart attack risk factors (<em>Circulation<\/em>, 2010;121(6):833-840) and be put on a lifestyle heart attack prevention program (<em>Circulation<\/em>, 2016;133(5):537-541). This will save lots of lives because prostate cancer is usually a slowly progressive disease and men are more likely to die from heart disease. Ten years after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, the vast majority of men will survive whether they were treated with surgery, radiation, or \u201cactive surveillance\u201d where they were followed and not treated unless their cancer progressed (<em>New England Journal of Medicine<\/em>, September 14, 2016).<\/p>\n<p><strong>An Anti-Inflammatory Lifestyle Helps to Prevent or Treat Prostate Cancer and Heart Disease<\/strong><br \/>\nInflammation means that your immune system is active all the time. Your immune system is supposed to be good for you because it prevents germs from getting into your bloodstream, and it seeks out and destroys the millions of defective cells (cancer cells) that everybody produces every day. However, an overactive immune system (too much inflammation) can use its cells and proteins to attack and destroy the DNA in healthy cells, altering them so they may become cancer cells that can overgrow, invade healthy tissue and kill you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Live As Healthfully as Belafonte Did<\/strong><br \/>\nYou can help to prevent and treat heart disease and cancer with an anti-inflammatory lifestyle that should be followed for your entire life. The anti-inflammatory lifestyle rules include:<br \/>\n\u2022 try to exercise every day,<br \/>\n\u2022 avoid red meat, processed meat, sugar-added foods, sugared drinks including fruit juices, and fried foods<br \/>\n\u2022 eat large amounts of fruits, vegetables and seeds<br \/>\n\u2022 lose excess body fat, particularly in the belly<br \/>\n\u2022 keep blood levels of hydroxy vitamin D above 30 ng\/dL<br \/>\n\u2022 restrict or avoid alcohol<br \/>\n\u2022 avoid smoking and second-hand smoke<br \/>\n\u2022 avoid chronic exposure to excess sunlight<br \/>\n\u2022 avoid exposure to X rays and other sources of radiation<br \/>\n\u2022 avoid exposure to harmful chemicals such as insecticides, herbicides and industrial chemicals<br \/>\n\u2022 treat chronic infections anywhere in the body.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Harry_Belafonte\">Harry Belafonte<\/a><br \/>\nMarch 1, 1927 &#8211; April 25, 2023<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harry Belafonte was a Jamaican-American singer, actor and activist who won three Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, an Emmy Award, and a Tony Award and starred in several Hollywood films. Above all, he was a humanitarian who took the sides of the downtrodden and advocated the most good for the most people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1253,124,117],"class_list":["post-6798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-histories-and-mysteries","tag-calypso","tag-heart-disease","tag-prostate-cancer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drmirkin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}