Quote

I delighted in the music of Africa, the earliest of the slave plantation songs, the transformation into Christianity and all that Christianity brought to the lives of the Africans who were forced to come to America.

Harry Belafonte

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Harry Belafonte
Age: 97
Born: 1927
Born: March 1
Actor
Peace Activist
Recording Artist
Singer
Songwriter
Television Actor
Harlem
New York
King of Calypso
Harold George Bellanfanti Jr.
America
Africa
Music
Transformation
Come
Slave
Plantation
Brought
Plantations
Christianity
Africans
Songs
Earliest
Lives
Delighted
Song
Forced

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Through electing officials that will protect the Constitution and commit themselves to the rights of the people and the health of the nation, we will be able to ensure that no group of ideologues and no private sector institution can coopt our rights, take us into senseless wars and steal the nation from its people.
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Terrorism is in many, many ways the final utterance of voices unheard.
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I think being born in America and growing up exclusively within the American boundaries of race and race oppression is a very different experience for those of us who grew up under the boundaries of race and race experience in the Caribbean or for those who grew up in Africa.
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Each and every one of you has the power, the will and the capacity to make a difference in the world in which you live in
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Where is the raised voice of black America? Why are we mute?
Harry Belafonte
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The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.
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Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.
Harry Belafonte
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Although we had a lot of villainy here in America, Adolf Hitler was certainly the most visible illustration of what would happen if fascism went unchallenged.
Harry Belafonte
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You can cage the singer but not the song.
Harry Belafonte
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In the gun game, we are the most hunted. The river of blood that washes the streets of our nation flows mostly from the bodies of our black children.
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If I've impacted on one heart, one mind, one soul, and brought to that individual a greater truth than that individual came into a relationship with me having, then I would say that I have been successful.
Harry Belafonte
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Bin Laden didn't come from the abstract. He came from somewhere, and if you look where ... you'll see America's hand of villainy.
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Turning against the church I also had to turn against a lot of the teachings of people in my family who were very much of the church and caught in it, and every time I turned to find where resides the good in the church, all I saw was the demonic, the Lucifer of the journey.
Harry Belafonte
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Since I have escaped the harshness of the economic bounds of poverty, I have stayed very connected to it spiritually. I reside and live and go and socialize and exist among those who suffer daily from the relationship that they have to poverty, Black men and women who are incarcerated. Actually, all people who are incarcerated, not just Black.
Harry Belafonte
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Many who have nothing opposed to the few who have everything, and as long as these disparities remain, as long as these distances remain between people and forces, I think we'll be in a perpetual state of upheaval.
Harry Belafonte
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Do not submit. It is extremely critical that repression be met full head-on and that it be resisted with every fiber in our being. There is just absolutely no compromise that can be made with it.
Harry Belafonte
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These children and their parents know that getting an education is not only their right, but a passport to a better future - for the children and for the country.
Harry Belafonte
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Without compromise repression would be defeated. Just as some cancers feed on hormones, compromise becomes the hormone of oppression.
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Colin Powell's committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.
Harry Belafonte
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From the point of view of the poor, the hungry, the disenfranchised, the wretched of the Earth... there will never be peace until their condition has been alleviated and until their humanity is in full bloom.
Harry Belafonte