Harry Belafonte Understood Persuasion

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The singer, actor, and activist hero Harry Belafonte died yesterday in New York City at age 96. Rising to fame in the 1950s, the charismatic performer of Caribbean folk music marshaled his celebrity and wealth in service of the civil-rights movement. Obituaries and other remembrances that detail his contributions will doubtless abound; those many achievements aren’t the bailiwick of this newsletter. Our lodestar is, instead, the proposition that civil, substantive engagement across seemingly intractable differences can improve the world.

Belafonte made a powerful case for that theory in a 2002 interview with the journalist Anthony Lewis that doubles as a window into the struggle Black people of his generation faced. An excerpt:

Having been victimized by McCarthyism and having