Julie Robinson Belafonte, Dancer, Actress and Activist, Dies at 95

Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with the singer Harry Belafonte, one half of an interracial energy couple who used their excessive profiles to assist the civil rights motion and the reason for integration in america, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95.

Her demise, at an assisted residing facility within the Studio Metropolis neighborhood, was introduced by her household. She had resided there for the final 12 months and 9 months after residing 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 varied occasions she was a dancer, a choreographer, a dance trainer, an actress and a documentary movie producer.

Ms. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world together with her husband and their kids throughout Mr. Belafonte’s sellout live performance excursions within the late Fifties and ’60s, presenting a picture of an in depth interracial household that was in any other case hardly ever seen on tv or in newspapers and magazines.

She was at Mr. Belafonte’s facet once 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 Pupil 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 through the years,” he advised the group, “when a high-profile relationship between a Black man and a white woman was seriously risky business.”

Julia Mary Robinson was born on Sept. 14, 1928, in Washington Heights in Manhattan to Clara and George Robinson, each of whom had Russian Jewish roots. She was raised in what she referred to as “an interracial environment,” reared by liberal mother and father and going to high school with each Black and white kids, she advised 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 scholar.

Across the age of 16, Ms. Robinson gained 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 G.E.D. diploma.) She quickly labored her approach as much as student-teacher on the faculty; 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-Nineteen Forties, Ms. Robinson auditioned in Philadelphia and was employed as its first white member.

“I never thought she’d integrate her company,” she recalled in an interview with the radio station WBAI in 2015, “but I knew I was a good 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 practically to her waist, toured the world with the Dunham dancers, generally rooming together with her fellow dancer Eartha Kitt, earlier than Ms. Kitt grew to become a celebrated singer and actress.

When the corporate was barred from accommodations due to race, a not rare incidence 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 Fifties, her mother and father had moved to Los Angeles, and Ms. Robinson wound up in Hollywood, serving to to choreograph dance sequences in no less than one movie and later acquiring small elements 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 biopic about Vincent Van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. By then she was going by Julie fairly than Julia.

She met Mr. Belafonte on the set of “Carmen Jones,” the 1954 film musical wherein he starred reverse Dorothy Dandridge, launched to him by Mr. Brando, a superb pal 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 Desire.”

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 cheerful marriage for the sake of his skyrocketing profession.

Their marriage resulted in 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 guide, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance.”

That they had 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 sizzling 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 rapidly married a white one carried the whiff of scandal. Whereas the liberal leisure circles wherein 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 well known supporter of civil rights and integration, took to the pages of Ebony, the main African American journal, writing an essay to proclaim that race had nothing to do with the wedding. “I believe in integration and work for it with all my heart and soul,” he wrote. “But I did not marry Julie Robinson to further 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 ultimately died down, and Ms. Belafonte put her profession apart to begin a household in Manhattan. However racial animus nonetheless trailed them. When their first youngster, David, was born within the fall of 1957, Ms. Belafonte obtained racist hate letters. “My first child,” she recalled within the WBAI interview. “Can you imagine?”

For months the Belafontes had been unable to acquire a bigger house in Manhattan as a result of landlords and actual property brokers refused to lease to an interracial couple, a predicament that made headlines. They ultimately discovered an house on West Finish Avenue, the place they lived for many years.

Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the household was continuously 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 Pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also called SNCC, internet hosting occasions at their dwelling and at accommodations for New York’s liberal moneyed class. She co-founded, with the actress Diahann Carroll, SNCC’s “women’s division,” sticking with the group even after it started to lose favor amongst many white People through the Black Energy period.

On the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, wherein each Belafontes participated, it was Ms. Belafonte who advised orange-jacketed non-public safety forces that the peculiar 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 house, 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 even handed messages from the federal government in Havana to American officers, based on a declassified State Division memo.

Ms. Belafonte pushed her personal causes aside from her husband’s, in a single case serving to to prepare, with Coretta Scott King, a girls’s march towards the Vietnam Struggle in Washington in January 1968. Prematurely of the occasion she positioned an advert in The New York Instances asking girls to “Make Womanpower Political Power.”

She sometimes joined Mr. Belafonte’s excursions as a dancer and, when their kids obtained older, acted in a couple of extra films, together with “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), wherein she appeared with Mr. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier because the spouse of an Indian chief, incomes essential reward. She had discovered a Native American dialect for the function.

The Belafontes divorced in 2007, and Ms. Belafonte stored 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), in regards to the resilience of the Mardi Gras Indian custom in New Orleans.

Following Margurite Belafonte Mazique’s demise 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 a real aggregator of types and created an atmosphere of diversity that was our home growing up,” David Belafonte mentioned in an interview. “She opened the home to just a bouquet of people — it was staggering. And Julie was the social glue that held that stuff together. There was no person too big or too small whom she wouldn’t wrap her arms around and make them feel like they were part of the crew.”