During Black History Month, we often turn our attention to individuals who were “firsts.” Their accomplishments are not only significant in and of themselves, but because they paved the way for others to follow and opened people’s imaginations to how things could be. This week we remember, Hollywood's first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, Sidney Poitier. He was also one of the last members of the Golden Age of Hollywood when he died at the start of this year at age 94.
Poitier’s life itself was the stuff of a great movie. He was the youngest of seven children, born to Evelyn and Reginald James Poitier, Afro-Bahamian farmers on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Young Poitier was born three months premature in Miami while the family was there on business. Though not expected to survive, he beat the odds and returned with his family to the Bahamas. At age fifteen, he was sent to Miami to live with this brother’s family. A year later, to get away from the racism of Jim Crow era Florida, he moved to New York City to become an actor. After overcoming some initial difficulties, including his noticeable Bahamian accent, he joined the American Negro Theater.
Poitier’s breakthrough film was the 1950 production, “No Way Out,” where he played a doctor treating a white bigot. Despite his success, this was a difficult time. As he later reflected, “[Blacks] were so new in Hollywood. There was almost no frame of reference for us except as stereotypical, one-dimensional characters. Not only was I not going to do that, but I had in mind what was expected of me—not just what other blacks expected but what my mother and father expected. And what I expected of myself.” And what he expected of himself was, “To walk through my life as my own man.”
Many of his best-known films explored the racial tensions of America. You will find many of these in the DVD display on the fourth floor of the library near the elevators including: A Raisin in the Sun, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In The Heat of the Night, and To Sir, with Love. (Portable DVD players can be checked out at the Library Services Desk.) His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the civil rights struggle and for this he was seen as a noble symbol of his race. However, some African Americans thought Poitier betrayed them by taking sanitized roles and pandering to whites, despite his advocacy for the civil rights movement, including participating in the 1963 March on Washington.
Nonetheless, Poitier continued to walk through life as his own man. An excellent example of this is from the 1967 film “In the Heat of the Night” where he played a Philadelphia detective assisting with a murder investigation in small-town Mississippi. In one scene, Poitier’s character is slapped by the town’s most powerful citizen. Poitier insisted he would do the movie only his character could slap him back. He also had it written into his contract that this scene could not be cut. The scene was so powerful, it even got the attention of anti-apartheid leader, Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
Poitier’s later career turned to directing and producing. He also went on to serve as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2007. In 2009, President Obama awarded Poitier the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying, "It's been said that Sidney Poitier does not make movies, he makes milestones ... milestones of artistic excellence, milestones of America's progress."