Smash hits to civil rights: Harry Belafonte – a life in pictures

Performing at a benefit for the US civil rights movement in Paris’s Palais des Sports, 1966

Belafonte funded the Freedom Riders and SNCC, activists fighting unlawful segregation in the American south, and worked on voter registration drives. He later focused on a series of African initiatives. He organised the all-star charity record We Are the World, raising more than $63m for famine relief, and his 1988 album, Paradise in Gazankulu, protested against apartheid in South Africa

Photograph: Spartaco Bodini/AP