Harry Belafonte has never been one to bite his tongue. He once compared Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to house slaves.
Time has not diminished his bluntness. In his memoir, "My Song," Belafonte says, "Barack Obama seems to lack a fundamental empathy with the dispossessed, be they white or black."
He also writes about how Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy jockeyed to assume leadership of the civil rights movement following the Rev. Martin Luther King's assassination.
While these potentially inflammatory remarks may make headlines, they shouldn't obscure the value of what is an honest, in many ways important and genuinely revelatory autobiography.
Belafonte hasn't performed or recorded for some time, so for many people, he's just the guy who sang about a banana boat. Probably fewer remember that he was a civil rights activist, at the front line of demonstrations against injustice.
But, as "My Song" reveals, Belafonte not only talked the talk, but he walked the walk.
He flew down to Greenwood, Miss., during Freedom Summer and was almost run off the road by men presumed to be KKK members. He was a trusted adviser to King. But in perhaps his most unheralded role, Belafonte often served as an intermediary between elements of the movement and the Kennedy administration, which initially was not enthusiastic in its support.
Belafonte was born in New York and grew up in a household with a difficult mother and a violent father. He spent some of his formative years in Jamaica, living with his maternal grandmother, before returning to Manhattan.
