Julie Robinson Belafonte, Dancer, Actress and Activist, Is Dead at 95

Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with the singer Harry Belafonte, half of an interracial energy couple who used their excessive profiles to help 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 yr 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 instances she was a dancer, a choreographer, a dance instructor, an actress and a documentary movie producer.

Ms. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world along with her husband and their youngsters throughout Mr. Belafonte’s sold-out live performance excursions within the late Nineteen Fifties and ’60s, presenting a picture of an in depth interracial household that was in any other case not often seen on tv or in newspapers and magazines.

She was at Mr. Belafonte’s aspect 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 by means of the years,” he instructed the gang, “when a high-profile relationship between a Black man and a white lady was critically dangerous enterprise.”

Julia Mary Robinson was born on Sept. 14, 1928, within the Washington Heights part of Manhattan to Clara and George Robinson, each of whom had Russian Jewish roots. She was raised in what she known as “an interracial setting,” reared by liberal dad and mom and going to highschool with each Black and white youngsters, she instructed the journal Redbook in 1958. She attended the Excessive Faculty of Music and Artwork in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia Excessive Faculty of Music & Artwork and Performing Arts), the place she was an artwork pupil.

Across the age of 16, Ms. Robinson gained a scholarship to the newly opened Katherine Dunham Faculty of Dance in Manhattan and dropped out of highschool to pursue a dance profession. (She later earned her Common Training 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 realize 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-Forties, Ms. Robinson auditioned in Philadelphia and was employed as its first white member.

“I by no means thought she’d combine her firm,” she recalled in an interview with the New York radio station WBAI in 2015, “however I knew I used to be 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 almost to her waist, toured the world with the Dunham dancers, generally rooming along with her fellow dancer Eartha Kitt, earlier than Ms. Kitt turned a celebrated singer and actress.

When the corporate was barred from motels 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 Nineteen Fifties, her dad and mom 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 components in a number 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 movie biography of Vincent van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. By then she was going by Julie moderately than Julia.

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

Ms. Robinson and Mr. Belafonte turned lovers, though Mr. Belafonte was nonetheless married to Margurite Belafonte, a Black schoolteacher and psychologist. He and Margurite (her given identify 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 led to 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 ebook, “My Tune: A Memoir of Artwork, Race, and Defiance.”

They’d sought at first to maintain the wedding a secret to guard Mr. Belafonte’s two younger daughters, Adrienne and Shari, along 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 shortly 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 now not content material with a Black spouse.

Mr. Belafonte, by then a widely known supporter of civil rights and integration, took to the pages of Ebony, the main African American journal, to jot down an essay proclaiming that race had nothing to do with the wedding. “I consider in integration and work for it with all my coronary heart and soul,” he wrote. “However I didn’t marry Julie Robinson to additional the reason for integration. I married her as a result of I used to be in love along with her and he or she married me as a result of 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 baby, David, was born within the fall of 1957, Ms. Belafonte obtained racist hate letters. “My first baby,” she recalled within the WBAI interview. “Are you able to think about?”

For months the Belafontes had been unable to acquire a bigger condominium 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 condominium on West Finish Avenue, the place they lived for many years.

Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the household was steadily 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 position within the civil rights motion deepened, so did Ms. Belafonte’s. She deliberate fund-raisers for the Pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also referred to as SNCC, internet hosting occasions at their dwelling and at motels for New York’s liberal moneyed class. She based, with the actress Diahann Carroll, SNCC’s so-called girls’s division, and caught 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 instructed orange-jacketed personal safety forces that the abnormal 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 condominium, dined with presidents on the White Home and with international leaders overseas, together with Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. At a time when Cuba and america had no official channels of communication, she handed messages from the federal government in Havana to American officers, in keeping with a declassified State Division memo.

Ms. Belafonte pushed her personal causes aside from her husband’s; in a single case she helped to arrange, with Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s spouse, a girls’s march towards the Vietnam Battle in Washington in January 1968. Upfront of the occasion she positioned an advert in The New York Instances asking girls to “Make Womanpower Political Energy.”

She often joined Mr. Belafonte’s excursions as a dancer and, when their youngsters had been older, acted in a number of extra motion pictures, together with “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), wherein she appeared with Mr. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier (who directed) because the spouse of an Indian chief, incomes important reward. She had realized a Native American dialect for the position.

The Belafontes divorced in 2007, and Ms. Belafonte saved 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 position of household matriarch, not solely to her personal youngsters however to these from Mr. Belafonte’s first marriage, Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte. The entire youngsters survive her, in addition to three grandchildren.

“She was an actual aggregator of varieties and created an environment of range that was our dwelling rising up,” David Belafonte mentioned in an interview. “She opened the house to only a bouquet of individuals — it was staggering. And Julie was the social glue that held that stuff collectively. There was no individual too large or too small whom she wouldn’t wrap her arms round and make them really feel like they had been a part of the crew.”