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Sidney Poitier
The January 6 death of Sidney Poitier came at a portentous time. The big screen’s seminal civil rights icon died on the one-year anniversary of an attempted insurrection by Confederate flag-waving white supremacists as the voting rights he’d campaigned for remained in limbo.
More than any other major actor in Hollywood history, Poitier’s motion picture odyssey resembles a tightrope act. He would eventually become the first Black man to win an Oscar, but was born in 1927 in Miami, Florida, and raised in the Bahamas. As an actor embarking on his career in a still racially segregated country, he had to somehow fulfill the expectations of two constituencies: Black as well as white audiences—who at the time bought most of the movie tickets and financed the films.
Poitier performed a delicate, intricate balancing act between appeasing white ticket buyers and film financiers by portraying a passive, unthreatening character as opposed to embodying a more assertive persona.
Poitier’s leftward-veering screen image was reflected in several movies with Black Power themes.
This balancing act extended beyond racial politics within the United States, too: In terms of the Black screen image, Poitier is a transitional figure. In D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan put the Reconstruction era’s civil rights proponents back into a submissive role, paving the way for a century of Jim Crow. For the next thirty-five years or so after Griffith’s motion picture paean to the KKK, Black actors played mostly subservient, sexless, superstitious, celluloid stereotypes typified by Stepin Fetchit, Mantan Moreland, and Butterfly McQueen.
Then three things happened that would change these humiliating onscreen depictions: The independence movements in Africa, the fight to overturn Jim Crow laws in the segregated South, and World War II. Black people who had fought against fascism abroad were unwilling to continue accepting racism at home. One of those WWII-era veterans was Poitier, who at sixteen lied about his age to join the Army.
In Poitier’s first credited movie role, 1950’s No Way Out, he plays a doctor who treats the criminal Richard Widmark, despite his abusive racism. The film, directed and co-written by Joe Mankiewicz, also depicts a race riot. In a way, No Way Out set the template for Poitier’s most successful screen image as the noble Black man who loftily sacrifices himself for ignoble whites.
But before he returned to this motion picture persona, Poitier played a reverend in the 1951 South Africa-set anti-apartheid drama Cry, the Beloved Country, clandestinely co-written by blacklisted Communist Party member John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten.
In 1957, Poitier co-starred in three roles that were departures from the “Good Negro” characters. In the Civil War drama Band of Angels, featuring Gone with the Wind’s Clark Gable, Poitier plays a plantation “House Negro” who escapes and joins the Union Army. In Something of Value, opposite Rock Hudson, Poitier became a leader of the violent Mau Mau uprising in Kenya against British colonialism. In The Mark of the Hawk, Poitier plays a character named “Obam” and is again embroiled in Africa’s anti-colonial cause, but this time he opts for nonviolence.
Poitier achieved greater success in Stanley Kramer’s 1958 The Defiant Ones as an escaped convict who sacrifices himself for the bigoted prisoner he has been chained to. White audiences cheered when his character gave up his chance for freedom to help Tony Curtis, but according to James Baldwin, Black ticket buyers jeered this act of self-sacrifice. A Hollywood favorite, both Poitier and Curtis were Oscar-nominated along with five more nominations, including for Best Picture; it won two Academy Awards (including for blacklisted screenwriter Ned Young, who used a pseudonym but was glimpsed in the opening credits playing a truck driver in a deliberate poke in the Hollywood Blacklist’s eye).
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Sidney Poitier in "A Raisin in the Sun"
Poitier played the disabled title character in Otto Preminger’s 1959 adaptation of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. He also attained well-deserved acclaim for playing the chauffeur who yearns for a better life in A Raisin in the Sun, the 1961 screen adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s Broadway hit.
That year, Poitier also co-starred with Paul Newman as expatriate jazz musicians who romance Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward in Paris Blues, directed and written by Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein, who’d both been blacklisted. In 1962’s Pressure Point, Poitier once again played a Black medical practitioner caring for a white racist, this time as a psychiatrist treating Bobby Darin’s imprisoned neo-Nazi.
In 1964, as President Lyndon B. Johnson was launching the “Great Society,” Poitier became the first Black performer to win a Best Acting Academy Award for a leading role and the first Black person to win any Oscar since Hattie McDaniel had won for playing the slave-cum-servant Mammy in 1939’s Gone with the Wind. As Homer Smith in 1963’s Lilies of the Field, Poitier is the Lord’s servant, henpecked by nuns into building a chapel.
Four years later, at the pinnacle of his stardom, Poitier was permitted to openly woo a white woman in Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? That same year, in 1967, Poitier starred in two other major releases, including a role as a teacher presiding over troubled white pupils from the slums of London’s East End in James Clavell’s pseudo-hip To Sir, with Love.
By this time, Poitier had become the world’s number-one box office star. Up until that point, his career trajectory had reflected the pro-integration, nonviolent, civil rights movement. But by 1967, as militants such as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and others vied with Dr. Martin Luther King for nonviolent direct action hegemony over the Black masses, civil disobedience competed with armed struggle. The new Black Power movement advocating self-defense impacted movies, too.
In the third and best of the trilogy of Poitier’s 1967 productions, he played a Philadelphia detective who confronted Southern bigotry. Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won five, including for Best Picture, Best Writing, and Best Actor for Rod Steiger. There’s a key, compelling scene that has been repeatedly screened in TV tributes to Poitier since his death, wherein Poitier transcends passive resistance and moves towards militancy. In this scene, a prominent plantation owner slaps Poitier—who, instead of just taking it, slaps the white man back. Steiger is staggered, at a loss as to how to react.
It was the slap heard around the world.
Poitier’s leftward-veering screen image was reflected in several movies with Black Power themes, although his characters weren’t necessarily militants per se. In 1969’s The Lost Man, Poitier uses an activist group as a diversion to pull off a heist.
And while Poitier fights with a white lawman in Brother John, Melvin Van Peebles actually shoots and kills a white policeman for using excessive force as the title character in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the actor-writer-director’s trendsetting militant movie made the same year, which advocated armed self-defense.
Poitier never fully made the transition for the new Black consciousness audience. His smooth, middle class, integrationist image and oeuvre were too ingrained for more politically left and militant moviegoers of the sizzling sixties and seventies. Although Poitier continued to act, including depicting Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela in liberal biopics, he started directing mass entertainment pictures in which he sometimes also acted. These were particularly popular with Black audiences, starting with the 1972 Western Buck and the Preacher, co-starring Harry Belafonte.
Poitier never resolved the contradictions engendered by a new “Black and proud” sense of self and racial pride. The trend of Blaxpolitation pictures depicted “kick ass” Black characters, although most of these 1970s’ flicks discarded the political consciousness of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. And after the upsurge of the “We-Shall-Overcome” and Black Power periods from the 1950s to the 1970s had subsided, and Reaganism reigned, there was less of a demand for Black-themed films and stars.
As the current iteration of the United States’ racial reckoning unfolds, it’s up to Black artists of today, such as Daniel Kaluuya, who won an Oscar for portraying a Black Panther revolutionary in Judas and the Black Messiah, Michael B. Jordan who was in the Africa-set Black Panther superhero blockbuster, and directors including Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay, to complete the image arc in the twenty-first century that Sidney Poitier helped launch in the twentieth.