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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Candace Allen

Belafonte is gone, Poitier went before him. They were the titans who uplifted our world

Harry Belafonte with Sidney Poitier at the New York premiere of The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965.
Harry Belafonte, left, with Sidney Poitier at the New York premiere of The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The ping today of a WhatsApp message and my heart wrenching at the news. Harry Belafonte. Gone.

Not that he hadn’t earned his rest at 96, but this was an incandescent beacon of most everything that can be good and right in a man – intelligence, closely considered and courageous political activism, guided by an unwavering moral compass that paused for neither breath nor age, encased in a package of heart-stopping beauty and grace.

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