And rather than simply translate his hot-ticket cabaret act for American living rooms, Belafonte imagined something stranger and more alluring. “The bleaker my acting prospects looked,” Belafonte wrote, in “My Song,” his memoir from 2011, “the more I threw myself into political organizing.” That organizing took familiar forms — marches, protests, rallies. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary, because Dr. King didn’t believe he could afford it. (“Martin began drafting his antiwar speech in my apartment.”) So, yes, Belafonte was near the psychic core and administrative center of the movement. But those bleak Hollywood prospects — some incalculable combination of racism and too-raw talent — kept Belafonte uniquely earthbound, doing a kind of cultural organizing.

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