Belafonte, 78, will be the keynote speaker at Duke’s Jan. 15 observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday. Since meeting King in the early 1950s, Belafonte has continued King’s activism and work for human rights. Belafonte also continues to be outspoken: Recently he sparked controversy when he compared Colin Powell to slaves who worked in the master’s house.

Belafonte said he chose to come to Duke in part because "I believe in talking to young people around the holiday."

"He did a lot to help friends at an advanced stage of cancer, bring dignity to the close of their lives,” Belafonte said. “He extended the invitation. On a personal level, I owe him so much."

Belafonte said he continues to remember King both as a friend and as a legendary figure who has served as a model for Belafonte’s continuing work. That includes organizing the "We are the World" song, which raised millions of dollars for famine relief in Africa, serving as a cultural adviser for the Peace Corps and as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

"My relationship with [King] personally led me with great constancy into this life of struggle. The one thing we all had in common was that we were in the struggle. And he emerged as a leader. He was, first and foremost, very human, and he was very concerned about what he had been mandated to do and he often wondered whether he had the authority and capacity to do it. It isn’t easy to be a leader. Do I know enough? Am I strong enough? What will happen to people if the decisions I make turn out to be incorrect? What will happen to people if the decisions I make turn out to be correct? He often brooded. The oppressor never yields the oppression willingly. He had all those things coming at him, and he had to respond to them. That was the aspect of him that I and a handful others knew intimately," Belafonte said.

"And then from the decisions that he made, this mythical person grew. And, of course, I understand the myth. And I’m really touched by both."

King inspired Belafonte, now 78, to extend his commitment beyond the Civil Rights Movement to the global effort to support human rights. He said he saw the two as connected, but that human rights was the "broader umbrella."

"One tends to think that the change of political machinery is what is central to the things that are needed to resolve the problems behind civil rights," he said. "When you talk about human rights, you are talking about the more general issues of gender problems, the rights of children, the right to go to school, the right to never be hungry and the rights of all people to have representation. The vast area of all human requirements."

Institutions such as Duke have a responsibility to integrate teaching about human rights and the humanities more generally into their curriculum, he said.

"Beyond the obvious things, such as having a very diverse student body and a very diverse and eclectic faculty and administration, I think one of the things that is most important for the university is to make sure it looks at its curriculum and what it teaches about our deeper humanity. That we integrate, always, subject matter that has to do with the understanding and study of human rights."

"Many universities, because of a shortage of funds, tend to look almost exclusively to the hard sciences, and we suffer deeply from the cutbacks. Arts and culture help to identify and reveal our humanity. I think that students need these tools when they go out into the community in which they reside, and also in their future life."

Click here for more information about the 2006 Martin Luther King Holiday Events.