Before Harry Belafonte the star, there was an ordinary New Yorker and a pivotal encounter

Harry Belafonte was remembered far and wide in the last week as an artistic colossus, a giant of stage and screen, the first person to sell a million copies of an album, with “Calypso,” in 1956. But beneath the international acclaim was the story of a single New Yorker who contended with the indignities of racial discrimination at seemingly every turn in his long life, and who eventually helped alter the culture of the city – and the nation.

Belafonte, who died Tuesday at the age of 96, spoke at length to WNYC listeners over the years, about his successes as an artist, the indignities he faced both as a Black entertainer and ordinary citizen, and the passions that drove his civil rights activism. In the interviews, he talks about life in a changing New York and nation, from the civil rights era through to the present.

He reveals his father as “a drifter, an alcoholic,” given to violence and “abject cruelty.” Belafonte describes leaving home to join the Navy during World War II, only to experience firsthand the humiliations “heaped upon Black soldiers.” Back in Harlem, though, his life would forever be altered by a chance encounter through his work – as an assistant building janitor.

“It was an epiphany for me because what I saw opened me up and revealed for me a place that I would never, ever leave,” said Belafonte, decades later. “I knew that I had found where I wanted to be and to be among people I wanted to be among.”

Here we draw from the WNYC archives to offer this audio portrait of Harry Belafonte. Click on the audio player and hear the singer, actor and activist tell the story himself.