NEW YORK, USA (AP) — Harry Belafonte, the civil rights and entertainment giant who began as a groundbreaking actor and singer and became an activist, humanitarian and conscience of the world, has died. He was 96.

Belafonte died Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his New York home, his wife Pamela by his side, said publicist Ken Sunshine.

With his glowing, handsome face and silky-husky voice, Belafonte was one of the first black performers to gain a wide following on film and to sell a million records as a singer; many still know him for his signature hit Banana Boat Song (Day-O), and its call of “Day-O! Daaaaay-O.” But he forged a greater legacy once he scaled back his performing career in the 1960s and lived out his hero Paul Robeson’s decree that artistes are “gatekeepers of truth”.

Belafonte stands as the model and the epitome of the celebrity activist. Few kept up with his time and commitment and none his stature as a meeting point among Hollywood, Washington and the civil rights movement.

Belafonte not only participated in protest marches and benefit concerts, but helped organise and raise support for them. He worked closely with his friend and generational peer the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, often intervening on his behalf with both politicians and fellow entertainers and helping him financially.

He risked his life and livelihood and set high standards for younger black celebrities, scolding Jay-Z and Beyoncé for failing to meet their “social responsibilities”, and mentoring Usher, Common, Danny Glover and many others. In Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman he was fittingly cast as an elder statesman schooling young activists about the country’s past.

Belafonte’s friend, civil rights leader Andrew Young, would note that Belafonte was the rare person to grow more radical with age. He was ever engaged and unyielding, willing to take on Southern segregationists, Northern liberals, the billionaire Koch brothers, and the country’s first black president, Barack Obama, whom Belafonte would remember asked him to cut him “some slack”.

Belafonte responded, “What makes you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?”

Belafonte had been a major artiste since the 1950s. He won a Tony Award in 1954 for his starring role in John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, and five years later became the first black performer to win an Emmy for the TV special Tonight with Harry Belafonte.

In 1954 he co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge in the Otto Preminger-directed musical Carmen Jones, a popular breakthrough for an all-black cast. The 1957 movie Island in the Sun was banned in several Southern cities, where theatre owners were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan because of the film’s interracial romance between Belafonte and Joan Fontaine.

His Calypso, released in 1955, became the first officially certified million-selling album by a solo performer, and started a national infatuation with Caribbean rhythms (Belafonte was nicknamed, reluctantly, the King of Calypso). Admirers of Belafonte included a young Bob Dylan who debuted on record in the early ’60s by playing harmonica on Belafonte’s Midnight Special.

Belafonte befriended King in the spring of 1956 after the young civil rights leader called and asked for a meeting. They spoke for hours, and Belafonte would remember feeling King raised him to the “higher plane of social protest”. Then at the peak of his singing career, Belafonte was soon producing a benefit concert for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that helped make King a national figure. By the early 1960s he had decided to make civil rights his priority.

“I was having almost daily talks with Martin,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir My Song, published in 2011. “I realised that the movement was more important than anything else”.

In 1963 Belafonte was deeply involved with the historic March on Washington. He recruited his close friend Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and other celebrities, and persuaded the left-wing Marlon Brando to co-chair the Hollywood delegation with the more conservative Charlton Heston, a pairing designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience. In 1964 he and Poitier personally delivered tens of thousands of dollars to activists in Mississippi after three “Freedom Summer” volunteers were murdered — the two celebrities were chased by car at one point by members of the KKK. The following year he brought in Tony Bennett, Joan Baez and other singers to perform for the marchers in Selma, Alabama.

When King was assassinated, in 1968, Belafonte helped pick out the suit he was buried in, sat next to his widow, Coretta, at the funeral, and continued to support his family, in part through an insurance policy he had taken out on King in his lifetime.

King’s death left Belafonte isolated from the civil rights community. He was turned off by the separatist beliefs of Stokely Carmichael and other “Black Power” activists and had little chemistry with King’s designated successor, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. But the entertainer’s causes extended well beyond the US.

Belafonte was very much a human being. He acknowledged extramarital affairs, negligence as a parent, and a frightening temper, driven by lifelong insecurity.

He was married three times, most recently to photographer Pamela Frank, and had four children. Three of them — Shari, David and Gina — became actors. He is also survived by two stepchildren and eight grandchildren.

Harry Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr in 1927, in Harlem. His father was a seaman and cook with Dutch and Jamaican ancestry and his mother, part Scottish, worked as a domestic. Both parents were undocumented immigrants, and Belafonte recalled living “an underground life, as criminals of a sort, on the run”.

By the 1950s Belafonte was also singing, finding gigs at the Blue Note, the Vanguard and other clubs — he was backed for one performance by Charlie Parker and Max Roach — and becoming immersed in folk, blues, jazz and the calypso he had heard while living in Jamaica. Starting in 1954 he released such top 10 albums as Mark Twain and Other Folk Favourites and Belafonte, and his popular singles included Mathilda, Jamaica Farewell and The Banana Boat Song, a reworked Caribbean ballad that was a late addition to his Calypso record.

“We found ourselves one or two songs short so we threw in Day-O as filler,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir.