Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a major force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.

At a time when segregation was still widespread and black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a few years no one in music, black or white, was bigger.

Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) and Jamaica Farewell. His album Calypso, which contained both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.

He was equally successful as a concert attraction: Handsome and charismatic, he held audiences spellbound with dramatic interpretations of a repertoire that encompassed folk traditions from all over the world — rollicking calypsos like Matilda, work songs like Lead Man Holler, tender ballads like Scarlet Ribbons. By 1959 he was the most highly-paid black performer in history, with fat contracts for appearances in Las Vegas, at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and at the Palace in New York.

Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Belafonte soon became the first black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though, and it was his friendly rival Sidney Poitier, not Belafonte, who became the first bona fide black matinee idol.

But making movies was never Belafonte’s priority, and after a while neither was making music.

He continued to perform into the 21st century and to appear in movies as well (although he had two long hiatuses from the screen), but his primary focus from the late 1950s was civil rights.

Early in his career, he befriended the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a life-long friend but also an ardent supporter of Dr King and the quest for racial equality he personified. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for that organisation and Dr King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

He provided money to bail Dr King and other civil rights activists out of jail.

He took part in the March on Washington in 1963. His spacious apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan became Dr King’s home away from home.

And he quietly maintained an insurance policy on Dr King’s life, with his family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure the family was taken care of after Dr King was assassinated in 1968.

In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after Dr King’s death, Belafonte expressed ambivalence about his high profile in the civil rights movement. He would like, he said, to “be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people”, adding, “I hate marching, and getting called at 3am to bail some cats out of jail.” But, he said, he accepted his role.

New York Times News Service