Harry Belafonte's Unique Personal Connection to Martin Luther King Jr.

Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., eulogized singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte on social media this week, reflecting on the close relationship that he had with her family and particularly her father.

"When I was a child, #HarryBelafonte showed up for my family in very compassionate ways. In fact, he paid for the babysitter for me and my siblings," Bernice tweeted on Tuesday alongside a picture of Belafonte at her father's 1968 funeral. "Here he is mourning with my mother at the funeral service for my father at Morehouse College. I won't forget...Rest well, sir."

Earlier that morning, Belafonte's longtime spokesman announced that Belafonte, 96, had died at his Manhattan home from congestive heart failure.

Belafonte is remembered as a barriers-breaking figure who rose to stardom at a time when racial discrimination and segregation were still widespread in the U.S. Besides his success as a singer and actor, his legacy is largely defined by his work toward achieving racial justice and his lifelong friendship with King.

Belafonte befriended the civil rights leader early in his career, acting as a major donor to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and repeatedly providing the funds to bail out King and other activists from jail. He said that his political views were already in place when he met King and that he was "utterly committed to the civil rights struggle." But King affirmed his outlook.

In 1963, he participated in the March on Washington, which was led by King and became the most prominent protest action for civil rights in American history. King famously delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech as the event's keynote speaker.

On the 50th anniversary of that day, Belafonte recalled how "truly inspiring" the march was and revealed his thoughts on his friend's renowned speech, which he said he helped write.

"I was not surprised by the content, because we had worked with him on it and we were in tune with the message, but what we were not prepared for was the delivery, the oratory," Belafonte wrote in a 2013 op-ed for The Guardian. "The imagery flowed, the language flowed. It was Shakespearean."

In the op-ed, he urged America to stop the "deification" of King so people could "begin to understand how an ordinary man is empowered to find himself."

"[King] came from somewhere and that somewhere was the same hardship and struggle to survive of many of his followers," Belafonte wrote. "He had the same fears and hopes and anxieties and aspirations. To deify him is, in a way, to reduce his achievement and to remove the radicalism from it."

Belafonte provided financially for the King family throughout his friendship with the civil rights leader. The babysitter that Bernice remembered on Tuesday is well documented. Belafonte had hired a nurse to help the family shortly after Bernice's birth in 1963, at the peak of the civil rights movement. Even after King's assassination, Belafonte continued to give money to the family.

"Whenever we got into trouble or when tragedy struck, Harry has always come to our aid, his generous heart wide open," King's wife, Coretta Scott King, said of Belafonte in her autobiography.

However, his relationship with the King children was rocky at times.

In 2006, he was disinvited by the children to speak at Coretta's funeral after then-President George W. Bush said he would attend. Belafonte had been an outspoken critic of Bush.

In 2013, Belafonte sued King's three surviving children, including Bernice, in a dispute over three documents that Belafonte said were his property but that the children said belonged to their father's estate. The documents consisted of an outline of one of King's famous speeches, reflections about the two men's friendship and notes King carried in his pocket the day of his death.

The suit was settled the next year, with Belafonte retaining possession.