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Creator
Kennedy, Jay Richard
Call number
Sc MG 617
Physical description
0.63 linear feet (2 boxes)
Language
English
Preferred Citation
[Item], Harry Belafonte files, Sc MG 617, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library
Repository
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division
Access to materials
Request an in-person research appointment.

Jay Richard Kennedy, author, composer, and publisher, was an entertainer and civil rights activist. He also was Harry Belafonte's manager and agent from 1955 to 1956. Born Samuel Richard Solomonick of Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx in 1911, Kennedy was a union organizer and the circulation manager of the Communist Party's Daily Worker. He left the Communist Party after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, and started a new career as a writer, entertainer's agent, and stock broker. For a ten-year period beginning in 1956, he provided information and analysis to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on Belafonte, the American Communist Party, and the Soviet Union. He died in 1991, in Los Angeles. Kennedy's Belafonte files are divided into Agent and Informant series. The Agent files include correspondence between Belafonte and his agents, Kennedy and Jack Rollins; contracts; legal briefs; financial reports; and a termination agreement between Kennedy and Belafonte, a dispute which lingered until 1960 over the control of Shari Music Publishing. Also included are original materials and several versions of the script for the musical drama Sing Man Sing, with lyrics and music by Kennedy and Belafonte.

Scope and arrangement

Kennedy's Belafonte files are divided into Agent and Informant series. The Agent files include correspondence between Belafonte and his agents, Kennedy and Jack Rollins; contracts; legal briefs; financial reports; and a termination agreement between Kennedy and Belafonte, a dispute which lingered until 1960 over the control of Shari Music Publishing. Also included are original materials and several versions of the script for the musical drama Sing Man Sing, with lyrics and music by Kennedy and Belafonte.

The Informant files extend from 1956 to 1965. Federal agents, presumably from the CIA, interviewed Kennedy in the wake of Belafonte's hostile testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956. Included are a 40-page "Summary of Some 30 Hours of Detailed Background" given by Kennedy to an agent identified as NF (January 1957), and a 36-page narrative, "Meeting with Steve Nelson", with attachments, authored by Kennedy (1956-1957). Also included are eight letters from Morse Allen, CIA director of Security Research Staff (1960-1965); an 8-page report on Belafonte culled from material provided by Kennedy (1965); and a 1965 "Last Will and Testament" by Kennedy, charging that, should he die of unnatural causes, "the assassins would be Peking communist agents in the United States working directly with Harry Belafonte, Stanley D. Levison, and Martin Luther King".

The Harry Belafonte files are arranged in two series:

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Purchased from Charles Apfelbaum Rare Manuscripts and Archives, 1997.

Processing information

Accessioned by Andre Elizee, 2008.

Separated material

Transferred to the Photographs and Prints Division: photograph

Related Material

Garrow, David. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981

Steve Nelson papers, Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archives, New York University

Using the collection

Location

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division
515 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, NY 10037-1801
Second Floor