The Harlem library that once helped Harry Belafonte become the artist and activist he is today will now bear his name.
"This library being in this community, it did much to shape my life," Belafonte said inside the branch previously known as the 115th Street Library.
Belafonte, who grew up in the neighborhood, struggled with dyslexia and dropped out of high school. But he found a way forward in the library, and was introduced to theater not far away at the Schomberg Collection of the New York Public Library, then on 135th Street, where he attended a show after being paid with tickets for janitorial work he'd done.
"I found a place where my activism could be nourished," he said. "It was the public library system that gave me the chance to read books that I would never have touched otherwise."
Chris Noth, Harry Belafonte book date for N.Y. Public Library
Mayor de Blasio unveiled a plaque bearing the library's new name, and asked the crowd to imagine a younger version of Belafonte walking through its doors in the 1930s or 1940s.
"There's a young man or a young woman on that same pathway right now, we don't know who they are, and we may feel challenged by some of what we're living through right now, but we know that you found the world and the world found you," de Blasio said. "And the next activist is on his or her way to enlighten us all, strengthen us all."
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