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 assist the civil rights motion and the reason for integration within the United States, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95.

Her demise, at an assisted residing facility within the Studio City 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 instructor, 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 sold-out live performance excursions within the late Nineteen Fifties and ’60s, presenting a picture of a detailed 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 after they deliberate and hosted fund-raisers for civil rights teams, together with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the extra militant Student 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 informed the gang, “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, 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 referred to as “an interracial environment,” reared by liberal mother and father and going to highschool with each Black and white kids, she informed the journal Redbook in 1958. She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), the place she was an artwork pupil.

Around the age of 16, Ms. Robinson gained a scholarship to the newly opened Katherine Dunham School of Dance in Manhattan and dropped out of highschool to pursue a dance profession. (She later earned her General Education Diploma.) She quickly labored her approach as much as student-teacher on the college; 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-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 New York 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 turned a celebrated singer and actress.

When the corporate was barred from inns due to race, a not rare prevalence within the United States 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 mother and father had moved to Los Angeles, and Ms. Robinson wound up in Hollywood, serving to to choreograph dance sequences in at the least one movie and later acquiring small elements in just a few 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 fairly than Julia.

She met Mr. Belafonte on the set of the 1954 film musical “Carmen Jones,” during which he starred reverse Dorothy Dandridge, launched to him by Mr. Brando, good friend 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 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 e-book, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance.”

They had 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. But white gossip columnists and the Black press had been scorching 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 girl and so rapidly married a white one carried the whiff of scandal. While the liberal leisure circles during which 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 well 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 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 finally died down, and Ms. Belafonte put her profession apart to begin a household in Manhattan. But racial animus nonetheless trailed them. When their first little one, David, was born within the fall of 1957, Ms. Belafonte acquired 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 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 finally discovered an condominium on West End Avenue, the place they lived for many years.

Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the household was regularly 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 within the United States.

As Mr. Belafonte’s function within the civil rights motion deepened, so did Ms. Belafonte’s. She deliberate fund-raisers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also referred to as SNCC, internet hosting occasions at their dwelling and at inns for New York’s liberal moneyed class. She based, with the actress Diahann Carroll, SNCC’s so-called ladies’s division, and caught with the group even after it started to lose favor amongst many white Americans through the Black Power period.

At the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, during which each Belafontes participated, it was Ms. Belafonte who informed orange-jacketed non-public safety forces that the strange 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.

During 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 House and with international leaders overseas, together with Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. At a time when Cuba and the United States had no official channels of communication, she handed messages from the federal government in Havana to American officers, in line with a declassified State Department memo.

Ms. Belafonte pushed her personal causes other than her husband’s; in a single case she helped to prepare, with Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s spouse, a ladies’s march in opposition to the Vietnam War in Washington in January 1968. In advance of the occasion she positioned an advert in The New York Times asking ladies to “Make Womanpower Political Power.”

She often joined Mr. Belafonte’s excursions as a dancer and, when their kids had been older, acted in just a few extra films, together with “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), during which she appeared with Mr. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier (who directed) because the spouse of an Indian chief, incomes vital reward. She had discovered a Native American dialect for the function.

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 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. All of the 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.”