Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier (1927-2022) was by far the biggest Black film actor in the US in the 1950s and 1960s. He became the first Black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor in 1963, an honour not extended even to Stepin Fetchit or James Baskett (Uncle Remus). Poitier proved, but Hollywood did not learn, that White audiences will watch movies with a Black hero.

Some films he appeared in:

• 1947: Sepia Cinderella – his first film, a Black musical where he appeared as an extra
• 1950: No Way Out
• 1955: Blackboard Jungle – made his name
• 1958: The Defiant Ones –  with Tony Curtis
• 1959: Porgy and Bess – racist
• 1961: Raisin in the Sun – anti-racist
• 1961: Paris Blues – with Diahann Carroll
• 1963: Lilies of the Field – helps nuns build a chapel, wins an Oscar
• 1965: A Patch of Blue
• 1967: To Sir, With Love
• 1967: In the Heat of the Night
• 1967: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – his most famous film
• 1968: For Love of Ivy – he gets a love scene!

Some films he directed:

• 1974: Uptown Saturday Night
• 1975: Let’s Do it Again
• 1977: A Piece of the Action
• 1980: Stir Crazy
• 1990: Ghost Dad

He appeared in the first three of these.

Stepin Fetchit 2.0: Poitier’s characters were a step up from Stepin Fetchit, the most successful Black actor of the 1930s. Poitier’s characters spoke in Standard English, had an inner dignity unimagined by Stepin Fetchit, even yelled back at White people. His characters seemed way less stereotyped, sometimes they seemed an ideal of middle-class respectability – and yet it was often just an old stereotype repackaged: the Tom, as in Uncle Tom, that goes back to the happy, loyal slaves of pro-slavery propaganda.

Reconfigured to the greater good of Whiteness is how bell hooks would put it. Poitier always seemed to be helping White people – building a chapel for White nuns in the middle of nowhere, being the seeing-eye dog for a blind White girl, educating White schoolchildren in some neglected part of London, sacrificing himself for a White character, etc. Not till “In the Heat of the Night” in 1967 did he slap one back! Even the “controversial” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” did not come out till six month after mixed-race marriage had been made legal coast-to-coast (in Loving v Virginia).

Neutered: And, despite being clear leading-man material, he did not rate a love scene till 1968. Instead he was paired incongruously with nuns or Ruby Dee or only got a kiss. No scenes with Dorothy Dandridge and her long legs for him. He was paired with Diahann Carroll, Barbie to his Ken, in “Paris Blues”, but sadly that film fizzled.

To his credit, though, he did openly support the Civil Rights Movement – Hollywood did not write all his lines – and in the 1970s he made films by and for Black people that were not blaxpoitationist.

Bahamian American – born in Miami, he grew up in the Bahamas where his family is from. There were so few White people he did not think of himself as Black. He was sucked back into the US by Miami’s construction boom of the 1940s. He later travelled to New York, got rid of his Bahamian accent, and joined the American Negro Theater.

Requiescat in pace.

– Abagond, 2022.

See also:

• respectability politics
  • overprove
• stereotype
  • the Tom stereotype
• Hollywood
  • #OscarsSoWhite
  • Blaxpoitation films
• Stepin Fetchit
• Dorothy Dandridge
• Diahann Carroll
  • In memoriam: Diahann Carroll
• American Negro Theater
• Loving v Virginia
• bell hooks
  • Aisha Muharrar: Black Best Friend

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