December 11, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon was the first full biography of legendary actor Sidney Poitier written by Aram Goudsouzian, professor of history at the University of Memphis.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people up next to story about Sidney Poitier, perhaps the
most important actor of the twentieth century, and certainly an
actor who taught us all how to live and how
to conduct ourselves. Sidney Poitier, Man, Actor Icon was the
(00:33):
first full biography of Poitier written by a professor of
history at the University of Memphis, which is just an
hour north of where we broadcast in Oxford, Mississippi. So
Greg Hengler took the short drive north to get the story.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Let's take a listen. My name is Aaron Gonzuzim.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm a professor of history at the University of Memphis,
and the first book I ever wrote was Sidney Poitier
Man Actor Icon in two thousand and four, and that
book was originally my PhD dissertation when I was a
student at Purdue University. Sidney was born on cat Island,
which is one of the out islands in the Bahamas.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
In other words, it was a primarily rural, agricultural.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Island on the cusp of the Bahamas, and it was
a fairly isolated place in his childhood. When he was
growing up in the nineteen thirties, it was in the
midst of the Great Depression. It was a place that
still had kind of a barter economy rather than a
cash economy, and there was sort of a lot of
freedom for a young child like Sidney, Poidiet or Rome.
Sidney was the youngest of seven children. I think there
(01:36):
were five brothers and two sisters. The oldest brother, Cyril,
was about fifteen years older than he was.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
And having a big family like.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
The Poitiers was more the rule than the exception on
cat Island because therese were farming families for the most part.
You know, the more children you had, the more people
you could put to work. So they were instilled with
these values of hard work and personal discipline from their
earliest beginnings.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Cat Island was idol. It was a place.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
You know, he was there when he was still a
young boy, and he just remembers being able to roam freely,
to play, to swim, to fish. For young children, Cat
Island was a gigantic playground. After chores, Sitney off from
roam the island unsupervised, wandering down narrow flower line paths,
(02:22):
building mud huts, collecting turtle eggs, swimming in the Atlantic,
and climbing Sapadia trees to shake down the plump, gray
brown fruit and eat until his stomach ached. He caught fish,
added peppers and limes, and stowed it in a can
over a fire on the beach. His imagination drifted out
to sea, to the world beyond cat Island. I'd stand
on the pier, as he recalled, and watched the ships
(02:42):
until they disappeared, and then I'd just stare at that
line and dream.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I was a real dreamer.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I'd conjure up the kind of worlds that were on
the other side and what I'd do in them. So
many hours I stared at that line. He would later
credit that as kind of giving him some of the
tools of an actor. The physical expressiveness, the ability to
sort of experiment physically, just sort of gave him a
sense of.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
His body, as he put it, that would benefited him
in his professional career as an actor.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
But at the same time, there was crushing poverty, and
so his family moved to the capital city of Nassau,
and it was there that Poier really started to have
to endure more struggles.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
He was growing into his teenage years. But now he
was in an urban environment.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
He would sometimes engage in petty crime and he ran
into trouble sometimes with the colonial authorities because Bahamas was
still a British colony at the time, and this was
really sort of rubbed his father the wrong way is
His father, Reginald Poiitier, was very much a disciplinarian, a
man who had survived basically on the basis of his
hard work. He had been a tomato farmer back in
(03:46):
cat Island and just was used to backbreaking labor, and
his father really emphasized lessons of personal virtue, of hard work,
of taking responsibility for yourself, and the famous lesson that
he cast down to his son was that the measure
of a man is how he provides for his family.
And that was the lesson that kept coming back to
(04:07):
Sydney as he grew into his elthood as he reflected
on his own life later on, that was the big
legacy that his father had left him. So his mother, Evelyn,
was the one who basically taught him more the lessons
of how to be a good human, how to live
amongst others, how to be a participating member in society,
(04:29):
and he saw that firsthand in some of the jobs
that she had to take on when they moved to Nassau,
when Reginald had become too old and too frail and
too sickly to work successfully, and she took all the
odd jobs she could to provide for the family. She
even took a job that pounded called pounding rock, basically
turning rock into powder. And she was the one who
(04:51):
was who especially insisted on sort of the personal codes
of respect for others, of looking out for your family.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
She enforced that one daily level in his life.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
And these were, you know, values, the values of his parents,
were values that would stick with him forever, you know.
Towards the end of his life, he was celebrated at
the Kennedy Center Honors and when everyone in the massive
theater was standing and applauding and cheering him, he stood
up and he looked up into the skies and you
could and you could see him mouth my mother, my father.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
So it was almost by.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
An accident of history that Sidney Potier had American citizenship.
He was born in Miami only because his parents had
sailed to Miami to sell their tomato crop, and Sydney
was not due to be born still for quite some time.
But then while they were in Miami, his mother, Evelyn,
gave birth to him prematurely, and it appeared that he
wasn't going to survive, to the point where his father
(05:49):
even went out and bought a tiny coffin to bury
him in that was no.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Bigger than a shoe box.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
But his mother fiercely insisted that Sydney would survive, that
he would live, and she he even went to the
point of visiting a soothsayer, a fortune tell and the
fortune teller assured her that he would live, that he
would grow on to do great things, that he would
even walk with kings, and Evelyn just sort of absorbed
(06:16):
that message. She took it as sort of an element
of faith, and she went back to her husband and said,
you know, no, this child's going to live.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
We're going to nurse him to health. And that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And you're listening to Aram Goodsuzian tell the story of
Sidney Potier, and what a story. Indeed, he grows up
in this idyllic, real remote part of the Bahamas called
cat Island, and he was able to roam free a
part of a rural family background, and every other family
was like it, lots of kids because they were labor
(06:46):
within all that time to roam free and imagine and
dream and play. And then he goes to Nassau, the
bigger city, and things start to turn south. He starts
to get into trouble. A boy do we learn a
lot about his mother and his father, and we already
start to understand more about this remarkable actor and his
life's work. And my goodness, watches movies now hearing what
(07:07):
we just heard, and you'll understand so much more about
Sidney Poitier's life.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
When we come back.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
More of the life story of Sidney Poitier here on
Our American Stories. Lee Habibe here the host of our
(07:33):
American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring
stories from across this great country, stories from our big
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show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
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the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go
(07:56):
to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give And we continue
here with our American stories and with Aarm. Goodsuzian and
Aarm is the author of Sidney Poitier Man Actor Icon.
(08:19):
Let's return to aarm for more of the story.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Again, by this accident that he was born in Miami
that would end up having a transformative effect on his life,
because when Poitier made the choices that he made, that
sort of you could get him in trouble in the
way that happened to many black teenagers living in.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Nassau around that time.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It sort of stirred a family drama in that sense
because when he was fifteen years old, he was shipped
off back to Miami to live with a brother, Cyril,
who was already living there, and Sydney already had American citizenship,
so it paved a path for him to come to
the United States and that.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Began the next chapter in his life.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
In the Bahamas was a black majority, you know, the
majority of the population is black, and so there isn't
there weren't the same codes of segregation.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
There weren't the same codes of.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Direct racial exploitation that Sydney was very shocked to find
when he came to Miami, which was part of the
Jim Crow South. In this era, and he found himself
just absolutely flu mixed by not only legal segregation but
also the informal codes that.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Governed black life in the in the South.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
So one of the odd jobs that he picked up
when he moved to Miami was working as a delivery boy.
And the first time that he did a delivery in
a white neighborhood, he knocked on the front door.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
And the person who answered the door screamed at him
and told him to go to the back door. And
he had no idea why you would do that, but
that was the racial code of the time.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
A black person is not supposed to go to the
front door of a white person's home. And he was
so sort of flummoxed that he just left the delivery
at the front door and the bicycled away.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
So after some time in Miami, Sydney knew he wanted
to leave.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
He knew that the racial codes of the Deep South
were not for him.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
A need to get out of there, and he didn't
really even really know how to do it at first.
You know, he tried to hop on a train just
assuming that it would take him to the North, you know,
sort of living.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
By the sort of this mythical idea of you could
hop on a train to the north, and he would
often end up, you know, in the middle of nowhere. Ultimately,
he ended up taking a job at a resort outside
of Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked for a summer doing
menial labor, and that gave him enough money and enough
experience to figure out how to buy a train ticket
(10:33):
to go further north, and he bought a ticket to
New York. And so he shows up in New York.
He's still, you know, just a kid really and is
sort of searching for his way. He's in his late teens.
He doesn't know anyone in the city. While there are
many West Indian immigrants in Harlem at that time, the
Bahamian community was quite small there, so he didn't have
(10:55):
any natural context in that sense, and.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
So he showed up.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
He was able to or rent a room with some
of his scratchings, but wasn't able to sort of sustain it.
There were nights when he slept in pay toilets because
that was all he could afford to do. There are
nights when he slept on rooftops because he couldn't afford
a place to stay. He didn't have any warm clothes.
Because this was a kid who had grown up in
the Bahamas and then was in Miami. So when winter
(11:19):
hit it was particularly a tough for him, and so
he survived by doing odd jobs. The primary job that
he often did was work as a dishwasher in a restaurant,
and so it was you know, the way that he
found work was often by He'd pull out the New
York Amsterdam News, the black newspaper in New York City
and look at the help wanted section. And then one
day he came across this ad that said actors wanted
American Negro Theater.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
And he said, you know, I've been a dishwasher, I've
done all these other jobs. I'll try this. So Tire came.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
To the American Negro Theater, which was housed in the
one hundred and thirty fifth Street Library in the heart
of Harlem, and the person who answered the door was
Frederick O'Neill when he knocked on it, and Frederick O'Neill
was kind of this giant theater. He was one of
the founders of the American Negro Theater. Just this absolutely
intimidating figure.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And he put poaier through an audition.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
And realized that he was a guy who had basically
no experience as an actor. Still spoke was kind of
a sing song West Indian accent, and as Patier remembers it, anyway,
Ordeoll kicked him out and said, wy, don't you go
get a.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Job as a dishwasher or something.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
And of course, because he had worked as a dishwasher,
he you know, this sort of burned in his soul.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
How could this guy say this to me? And so
he resolved that he was gonna become an actor.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
It was still sort of this quixotic idea for him
at the time, but he also had that sort of
code of personal discipline where he figured out how to
do it. He went back, he did some more auditions.
They needed more men because there were more women in
the troop than there were men, so they let him
sort of stick around. He worked as like, doing odd
jobs for the theater so that they would continue to
(12:53):
let him take the classes and become part of the organization,
and he trained himself to speak in a more American way.
He would imitate the voices on the radio. He would
go back to his small room and he would hear
the voice on the radio, say how do you do gentlemen?
And he would learn to say, how do you do gentlemen.
He also had in the other jobs that he worked,
(13:14):
and when he worked in a restaurant and he was
a dishwasher, and he was trying to learn how to read,
but he hadn't you know, he had just the basic
rudiments of it by the time that he was arriving
in Harlem in the nineteen forties. In one of the
restaurants that he worked at, there was a waiter, an
elderly Jewish man that he would later sort of credit
as having this incredibly important influence on his life, who
(13:35):
took a shine to him and agreed to try to
help him learn to read. So after they were done
with their shifts, they would sit down together and the
man would help him learn, and for party at this
had an enormous effect. He would have gone to become
a voracious reader. He would absorb information, he was constantly reading,
he was constantly entertained by ideas, and he was someone
who was, you know, sort of only half literate really
(13:56):
into his teenage years. So this is, you know, here's
he was just a story of one man's benevolence, having
a lasting effect on someone who would go on to
have national and international influence. After this long apprenticeship with
the American Negro Theater where he basically learned how to
be an actor, Poitier got his first break in the
late nineteen forties. He was cast in Anna Lucasta, which
(14:19):
was a play that the American Negro Theater had adapted
from a Polish play called Ana Lucaska and had turned
it into kind of a minor hit, and it started
to even play on Broadway. And then there were these
touring companies that went around the country, and Plie got
to join these touring companies and that was sort of
his baptism in the world of the black theater. And
so he was acting alongside people like Ossi Davis and
(14:39):
Ruby d you know, people who become lifelong friends. And
he got all sorts of experiences and you got to
see the United States as they traveled around, and was
able to earn some money. But into the late nineteen forties,
Poie's career.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Was very much piecemeal. He had, you know, a stage
opportunity here, a bit part in the play. Here.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
The American Negro Theater was starting to fall upon art
by the end of the nineteen forties because a lot
of its actors were using it as a launching pad
to get Broadway roles, and the American Negro Theater had
imagined itself as a independent black theater that was there
for the African American community, and so there was always
this constant tension.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Between uptown and downtown in that sense. And it was
also the beginnings of the.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Red Scare, and a lot of the people in Poitier's
milieu were part of that sort of leftist world.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Harlem was in many ways the center of radical political
activity in those early years of the Cold War. In fact,
the Communist Party moved its headquarters.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
To Harlem in the early nineteen fifties and.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
They established various organizations cultural organizations that were sponsored by
the Communist Party.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Some of the acting jobs that they got were through
this organization.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Called the Committee for the Negro in the Artists, which
kind of supplanted the American Negro Theatre as the primary
outlet for black theater talent. But it was an organization
that was a Communist front organization. It was funded by
the Communist Party. So this was the political world that
Poitier was negotiating just as his Hollywood career was starting
to take off.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
And we're listening to author Aaron Goodzuzi and tell the
story of Sydney Poitier. Aaron is a professor of history
at the University of Memphis, which again is just an
hour north of our home studios in Oxford, Mississippi. And
by the way, we asked him about whether Potier knew
whether he was working for a front group of the
Communist Party, and it was a no, And we just
(16:23):
wanted to clear that up, not trying to imply that
Poitier knew he was working for a front group of
the Communist Party. And by the way, what a life,
what a piece of storytelling. He experiences the heart of
segregation in Miami in the nineteen forties, and it's a
ruthless part and he couldn't believe it. It shocked him,
and he escaped to New York to live well wherever
(16:45):
he could, sleeping on rooftops in toilets. And then one
man saves his life, really, and that's Frederick O'Neill. He
doesn't give him a gold store for his crummy audition.
He tells him he's no good and thanks to Sydney's
father and mother, he has both the discipline, the resilience
and the perseverance to become the actor he'd always dreamed of.
(17:07):
It that rejection is important the city. When we come
back more of the life story of Sydney Poitier here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
(18:10):
stories and the story of Sidney Poitier, and we're talking
with Aaron Kotzuzian, who wrote the book Sidney Poitier Man
Actor kon Let's return to Aaron and more of the
life story of Sidney Poitier.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Play got his first break in Hollywood in nineteen forty
nine for a film that came out in nineteen fifty
called No Way Out. And No Way Out was at
the very end of a cycle of movies in Hollywood
that were known as message movies, movies that were designed
to combat racial prejudice. Gentlemen's Agreement is probably the most
famous of these movies, starring Gregory Peck that was about
anti Semitism, and No Way Out was a film in
(18:46):
which Poiitier played a doctor, a young doctor who had
treated a white patient who died and his brother was
vengeful and racist and was sort of out to get
Poitier as the doctor, and the end of this film,
Poitier's character admits to committing a murder just so that
there'll be an investigation in an autopsy into this body,
(19:09):
which will ultimately deffuse this this story. So he makes
this incredible sacrifice as this character. And in a lot
of ways, Patier's doctor in Noai outseets the template for
Prodier's entire career, basically his image, and it's in many
ways presenting a new black image on screen.
Speaker 5 (19:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
There were blacks who had been sort of sexual threats,
going back to movies like Birth of a Nation and
Party was not that at all. He played this very mannered,
middle class man who had a prim housewife. There were
characters who were song and dance men like Bill Robinson
for instance, and Paridi does not singer dances.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
He's a dramatic actor.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
There were characters who were sort of comic buffoons like
step and fetch It, and Protia's character was not that.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Again, he was this character who breathed.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Dignity, and he was not someone who was, you know,
who was threatening. You know, he wasn't violent. In fact,
he was sacrificial, right, So this film in the message
movie cycle, established a template where and established an image
for Poitier as this sort of good black man who
sacrifices on behalf of society and often helps out his
white co stars in a lot of ways. He became
(20:13):
kind of like a white liberals fancy of what a
black person should be like, and a white liberals construction
of if black people are like this, then how can
we not integrate into society? How can we not become
a more racially harmonious society. So he became a political
symbol in that sense.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
You know.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
After No Way Out, Poitier does find film roles here
and there, but he's still sort of struggling to squeak
out in existence in Hollywood, even to the point where
he opens a restaurant in Harlem called Ribs in the Rough,
a Ribs restaurant simply as a way as a backup plane.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
In case, in case acting doesn't work out.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
But then Partier gets his big break with the nineteen
fifty five film Blackboard Jungle, which is in the midst
of the sort of youth oriented films that are showing
appealing rebels if you think of Marlon Brando in The
Wild One or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
Poitier's character in Blackboard Jungle is a man named Gregory Miller,
who's a He's a teenager in a school in New
(21:08):
York and it's there's a bunch of rebellious boys who
are who are in this classroom. And Poitier's character is
electric in this room in the sense that.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
He's just he breathed cool. He is uh, he exudes
this this cool style, and.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
At first he's very resistant to the new white teacher
played by Glenn Ford, but the teacher recognizes in Poitier's
character this incredible ability to be a leader to sway
the whole classroom, and he basically courts him to his side.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
Hey, Miller, man, I wanta tough you a minute, Miller,
A man, a man's talker.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Miller.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
You know I've been looking up the records, and you're
a natural born leader.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
Yeah right, yeah, yeah, you are.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Those guys out there they like you very much.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Don't don't be modest with me, Miller.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
You know that you're a litle brighter, a little smarter
than the rest of those guys.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Right, Yeah, And every class needs a leader.
Speaker 5 (22:06):
You could be that leader, Miller.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
What you do, they'll do you cooperate and don't follow you.
How about it, Miller? Sure you think so? That's simple. Good,
that's fine, Miller. Take it easy, men sell Matt.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
So by the end of the film, Partier ends up
on the side of the teacher against the more villainous
white students who are against.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
The teacher and want a knife the teacher at the end.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
So here's a character who ends up embodying Pardier's typical
on screen persona the black man who helps the white
man to negotiate through this difficult arc in the white
person's career. But at the same time, he breeds such
electricity into the role. He brings such charisma into the
character of Gregory Miller that it becomes a role that vaults.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Him into the next level of his career.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
The film that really makes Sitting Body into a star,
that gives a top billing on a marque is The
Defiant Ones, a film.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
That comes out in nineteen fifty eight. It stars him
opposite Tony Curtis.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
They play prisoners, one white, one black, who are chained
to each other and they are able to escape from
a prison truck, and it's the story of their relationship.
They hate each other at first, race divides them. They're
each trying to scratch out some type of freedom, but
are chained to each other. And both characters earned Auscar
(23:33):
nominations for their role in this film. And again, just
like in Blackboard Jungle, we saw with Paidie with his
character in this film, Noah Cullen that he brings a
lot of subtlety to the role, sort of a humanity
to a character who could easily have become one dimensional.
And that's what makes it such a powerful film and
it's what makes it so appealing. At the same time,
(23:55):
this is a film that also plays into the Platier
pattern of sacrifice. At the end of the film, the
chain comes off the two of them and they're still
running away together and they're on a train. And at
the very end of the film, Party is able to
hop onto the train that's gonna take him to freedom,
and Tony Curs's character just can't make it.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
He's weak and wounded.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
So rather than ride off the freedom, Partier's character jumps
off the train and stays with his friend and cradles
them at the very end. And there's a terrific story
by James Baldwin about watching this film. The first time
he watches the film, he watches it in a downtown
New York theater.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Most of the patrons are white, and.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
At the end of the film, when Poutier leaps off
the train and stays with the white person, the audience
weeps and cheers and applauds, And as Baldwin reads it,
he says, you know, this is reassuring to them, This
is telling the black people are here for them, that
we're not going to disrupt them.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
And he rolls his eyes to some degree at that.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
And that's actually what prompts them to go see the
film for a second time in Harlem, Ming a primarily
black audience.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Of course, the movie goes the same way.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Partie jumps off the train at the end, and this
time the audience gets up and hoots and hollers and says,
get back on the train, you fall. So by the
early sixties, Putty is certainly emerging as a significant movie star.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
He has appeared in the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Defiant Ones, Poor Gean Bess. He was on Raisin in
the Sun, which had a long Broadway run, and then
was a successful film as well, in which he had
this incredible performance as Walter Lee Younger. He really defined
the role in terms of here's a young black man
who's coming into his own and learning how to provide
for his family and to show his dignity even as
he's facing an intensely racist society.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
And this is all of course occurring in the midst
of the rising civil rights movement.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
You have the student sit in movement of nineteen sixty
that spreads throughout the South, the Freedom Rides in nineteen
sixty one that bring integrated buses, and these demonstrations that
bring activists all throughout the Deep South. In nineteen sixty two,
you have James Meredith integrating the University of Mississippi, which
leads to a riot to try to prevent him from attending,
and ultimately federal marshals to protect him. So there's kind
(25:54):
of this early swelling momentum for the cause of African
American civil rights. And is the only black actor who
was obtaining leading roles in Hollywood films throughout this time,
so he essentially is emerging as Hollywood's response to the
civil rights film. He is how Hollywood deals with race
in the midst of the Civil Rights era, more or
less through the character.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
And icon of Sidney Poitier.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
And you've been listening to Aaron Goodzuzi and tell the
story of Sidney Poitier. No way out was his way
out in the end, and Richard Widmark played the part
of the antagonist. It was fascinating to listen to the
account of one of America's great black novelists and writers,
and that's James Baldwin tell the story of seeing this
(26:38):
movie in a white theater and a black theater and
the very different responses. What was remarkable about Poitier was
that he wasn't a song and dance man, the typical
African American song and dance man. He wasn't the comic,
the buffoon, nor was he threatening. He was something new
and something dangerous to everybody, something lovable to everybody. To
(27:00):
when we come back more of this remarkable story, when
we're talking about the life story of Sidney Potier. Here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
(27:39):
stories and with aarm Goodsuzian and he's the author of
Sidney Poitier, Man Actor Icon, And go to your local
bookstore and pick this up or order it through your
bookstore or go wherever you get your books. Let's pick
up now with aarm where he last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
And in nineteen sixty three he makes a film called
Lilli's of the Field.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
This is a low budget film.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
They only have two weeks to film the entire movie,
and it basically revolves around Partier's character, a man named
Homer Smith who's this traveling handyman in the American Southwest,
and he comes across a group of nuns, German nuns,
who basically ask him to build them a chapel, and
he ends up doing it, and he finds some kind
of sort of self worth in the story.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
It's it's an English lesson time.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I build a chapel, You build a chapel.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
You oh, we build a travel We mil a chapel.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
He be the chap amen Amen.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
A man, a man, a man. But also again, here's
the sort of classic Partier character, sort of divorced from
any kind of connection to a black community just on
his own, the sort of character of such innate goodness
that he ultimately builds a chapel for these nuns out
(29:10):
of the goodness of his heart and It is a
very heartwarming story. It's a sweet, well told story, but
it becomes something of a phenomenon, and part of it
is its political timing.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
It comes out in the fall of nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
This is in the aftermath of the March on Washington,
which was in August of that year, the massive demonstrations
for civil rights throughout the country, in the aftermath of
the violence in Birmingham, and so Poatier's character in that
film kind of captures a certain route, so to speak,
to the point where this is the film that gets
him the Oscar for Best Actor. He wins the Academy
(29:44):
Award in the spring of nineteen sixty four for Lilies
of the Field.
Speaker 5 (29:48):
The nominees for the Best Performance by an Actor Albert
Finney and Tom Jones, Richard Harris in This Sporting Life Wreck,
Harrison and Cleopatra, Paul.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Newman in Hu Sidney, Poitier in The Winner is Sidney, and.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
That, you know, creates new opportunities for Partier, It creates
new visibility. It also creates new complications because the civil
rights movement, as it continues to evolve, is approaching.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Something of a crossroads. Right.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
You have the philosophy of black power emerging by nineteen
sixty six and becoming more popular, and it emphasizes black
identity and black pride and some a certain sense of
disillusionment with the federal government, with white liberals, with you know,
sort of the mainstream themes of the Civil rights era
that Sydney Party had seemed to embody. And in each
of his films, Party continues to play some version of
(30:49):
the same kind of character that he's always played, and
each along the way he's breaking new barriers.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
In nineteen sixty seven, there's a poll that asks people,
would you go.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
See this film just knowing that this actor is in it?
And it turns out that Sidney Poidier ranks as the
most popular movie star in America based on this metric
at the end of nineteen sixty seven. And so there's
a sense of sort of racial crisis bubbling in America
over the course of the summer and into the fall
of nineteen sixty seven. And so at that point that
three Poitier movies come out in quick succession to Sir
(31:21):
with Love in the Heat of the Night and Guess
Who's Coming to Dinner, and each of these films in
its way, carries on the Sidney Poitier image, the Sidney
Poitier icon, So in a lot of ways, poitiers character
kind of seems to represent kind of like a.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Balm on those wounds.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
It soothes people's racial anxieties that black people can still
be their friend, can still be mannered, can still be helpful,
can still be non violent, It can still be Sidney Poidier.
And in the heat of the Night, which comes out
right after too Soar with Love builds on that idea.
Within this film, of course, is the famous so called
slap heard around the world, and where Poitier's character is
(31:59):
questioning this white aristocratic gentleman and Poitier's line of questioning
insults the man and he slaps Poitier, and Paridier's character
slaps him right back. And this is kind of a
watershed moment for many African American people viewers of the
time right, they've never been able to see this kind
of black action, this kind of black resentment rage expressed
on screen. But the larger pattern in the film is
(32:21):
still Podier working with whites.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Right, that aristocrat is kind of the outlier. He's the
villain in the story.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
All three of these films In the Heat of the Night,
To Show with Love and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,
all top number one of the box office, and so
Poidier is at this enormous peak of his start, and
then it kind of drops off a cliff, of course,
in April in nineteen sixty eight, that's when Martin Luther
King was assassinated. And at the time many people are
seeing this as sort of the end of an era, right,
(32:50):
and the philosophy of nonviolence is somewhat run its course.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
There's a deep sense of disillusion among many Black Americans
and rage of course as well.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
But what's also happening by the late nineteen sixties is
that you have more and more black critics shaped by
black power, who are increasingly and openly critical of Poitier.
And the most significant of the of these criticisms comes
from a playwright, a guy named Clifford Mason, writing the
New York Times toward the end of nineteen sixty seven,
(33:18):
and the big headline in the New York Times that
day was why does white America.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Love Sidney Poitier?
Speaker 5 (33:23):
So?
Speaker 3 (33:24):
And it's a brutal takedown of so many of Poitier's films,
and it includes some really harsh language against Poitier.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Critics are wondering, is Sidney Potuti obsolete? You know?
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Can you no longer you know, barely be a viable character,
because he continues to present this kind of image on
screen in the early seventies, And it's right around that
time that we're seeing a new type of black hero
appear on screen in the black exploitation movies in Shaft
and Superfly, and they're creating sort of an emotional resonance
with a lot of Black audiences at the time.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
They'd never really seen.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
These kinds of characters on screen before, and so it's
rushing too many African American audiences.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
But Partier feels a sting from this.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
In fact, he moves to the Bahamas at some point
in the early nineteen seventies for a few years, basically
to just sort of get away from this sort of
the political.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Heat that has been established here.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
But he's also exceptionally resourceful, very intelligent connections all through Holliday.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
He runs the most powerful black.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Man in Hollywood in the nineteen seventies, and so he
uses that leverage in some ways that in ways that
don't necessarily help his career but help the larger plight
of race on screen. So he does a trio of comedies,
for instance, Uptime Saturday Night, a piece of the Action
Let's Do It Again, that star Bill Cosby, and have
Harry Belfonte and a few of them Jimmy Walker. And
(34:41):
these are really sort of feel good movies that aren't
in the blaxploitation tradition.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
They're crossing over.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
They're esceptionally popular among black audiences, but they're also winning
white audiences. And Party is directing these films, and he's
you know, he's the one who's getting black people not
just in front of the screens, but behind the cameras too.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
He's employing more black people in Hollywood and have really
been employed.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
But also as he was able to sort of get
some distance, as he was able to tell his own story,
as he became kind of a veteran in Black Hollywood,
a mentor to actors like Denzel Washington or Will Smith
to the point where he's winning a Lifetime Achievement OSCAR
in the early two thousands, and you know, he's.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Able to sort of reflect back.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
He writes a couple of memoirs that tell the story
of his life. So like anyone who's approaching past middle
age and into their older years, he's able to look
back with pride on his accomplishments. And also because the
United States itself gets distanced from that tumultuous time, it's
easier to appreciate the contributions that Sydney Partier made in
a way that might have been difficult for.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Many Americans to see in the early nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
For instance.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
So there is this more sort of long standing appreciation
of a Partier's career that we see, you know, with
his recent passing, it was the tone was naturally celebratory
because he had been a barrier breaker, and he'd had
to negotiate through these difficult times and make difficult choices
that would have been a burden on anyone, and he'd
manage it with much more grace and style and.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Dignity then I think we have the right to expect.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
So it's two thousand and three and Barack Obama at
this point is still very much an underdog candidate for
the Senate. He's running in Illinois, of course, and his
campaign manager is running these various focus groups and you know,
the black candidates in Illinois political history had been able
to appeal primarily to a black insiduacy, but hadn't been
able to cross over. And his campign managers running this
(36:33):
focus group in particular with this group of white women
who are wealthy on the north shore of Chicago and
showing them images of the various candidates and what they
think about him. And when they showed them the picture
of Obama and they say, what does this make you
think about? One of the women says Sidney Pacier. And
it's at that moment that the campaign manager, Jim Cawley.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Says, WHOA, this is real. Here's a guy with actual
crossover appeal.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
And one more example of the ways in which Sidney
Poitier has shaped the patterns of American life and the
way that he has sort of appealed to the best
in our nature.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
And a great job on the production by Greg Hengler.
In a special thanks to Aaron Goodsuzian for his book
and his effort here telling the story, sharing the story
of Sidney Poitier. His book Sydney Potier Man Actor Icon
and well buy the book and if it's not there,
order it from your local bookstore or wherever you get
(37:33):
your books. The Defiant Ones, if you've never seen it,
see it. It gets him his first Oscar nomination, along
with the great Tony Curtis. Lilies of the Field gets
him his first Oscar And in nineteen sixty seven, My
Goodness to Serve with Love in the heat of the night,
Guess Who's coming to dinner? Watch all three films with
your family. And what Poitier had to face. The Black
(37:54):
Power movement didn't like him, and he was a threat
and to challenge to many white racists. And he held
that line and taught us all how to live and
to live with grace. In the end, Aaron was right.
He has appealed through his work for the best in
our nature. The story of Sidney Poitier here on our
American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people up next to story about Sidney Poitier, perhaps the
most important actor of the twentieth century, and certainly an
actor who taught us all how to live and how
to conduct ourselves. Sidney Poitier, Man, Actor Icon was the
(00:33):
first full biography of Poitier written by a professor of
history at the University of Memphis, which is just an
hour north of where we broadcast in Oxford, Mississippi. So
Greg Hengler took the short drive north to get the story.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Let's take a listen. My name is Aaron Gonzuzim.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm a professor of history at the University of Memphis,
and the first book I ever wrote was Sidney Poitier
Man Actor Icon in two thousand and four, and that
book was originally my PhD dissertation when I was a
student at Purdue University. Sidney was born on cat Island,
which is one of the out islands in the Bahamas.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
In other words, it was a primarily rural, agricultural.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Island on the cusp of the Bahamas, and it was
a fairly isolated place in his childhood. When he was
growing up in the nineteen thirties, it was in the
midst of the Great Depression. It was a place that
still had kind of a barter economy rather than a
cash economy, and there was sort of a lot of
freedom for a young child like Sidney, Poidiet or Rome.
Sidney was the youngest of seven children. I think there
(01:36):
were five brothers and two sisters. The oldest brother, Cyril,
was about fifteen years older than he was.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
And having a big family like.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
The Poitiers was more the rule than the exception on
cat Island because therese were farming families for the most part.
You know, the more children you had, the more people
you could put to work. So they were instilled with
these values of hard work and personal discipline from their
earliest beginnings.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Cat Island was idol. It was a place.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
You know, he was there when he was still a
young boy, and he just remembers being able to roam freely,
to play, to swim, to fish. For young children, Cat
Island was a gigantic playground. After chores, Sitney off from
roam the island unsupervised, wandering down narrow flower line paths,
(02:22):
building mud huts, collecting turtle eggs, swimming in the Atlantic,
and climbing Sapadia trees to shake down the plump, gray
brown fruit and eat until his stomach ached. He caught fish,
added peppers and limes, and stowed it in a can
over a fire on the beach. His imagination drifted out
to sea, to the world beyond cat Island. I'd stand
on the pier, as he recalled, and watched the ships
(02:42):
until they disappeared, and then I'd just stare at that
line and dream.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I was a real dreamer.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I'd conjure up the kind of worlds that were on
the other side and what I'd do in them. So
many hours I stared at that line. He would later
credit that as kind of giving him some of the
tools of an actor. The physical expressiveness, the ability to
sort of experiment physically, just sort of gave him a
sense of.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
His body, as he put it, that would benefited him
in his professional career as an actor.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
But at the same time, there was crushing poverty, and
so his family moved to the capital city of Nassau,
and it was there that Poier really started to have
to endure more struggles.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
He was growing into his teenage years. But now he
was in an urban environment.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
He would sometimes engage in petty crime and he ran
into trouble sometimes with the colonial authorities because Bahamas was
still a British colony at the time, and this was
really sort of rubbed his father the wrong way is
His father, Reginald Poiitier, was very much a disciplinarian, a
man who had survived basically on the basis of his
hard work. He had been a tomato farmer back in
(03:46):
cat Island and just was used to backbreaking labor, and
his father really emphasized lessons of personal virtue, of hard work,
of taking responsibility for yourself, and the famous lesson that
he cast down to his son was that the measure
of a man is how he provides for his family.
And that was the lesson that kept coming back to
(04:07):
Sydney as he grew into his elthood as he reflected
on his own life later on, that was the big
legacy that his father had left him. So his mother, Evelyn,
was the one who basically taught him more the lessons
of how to be a good human, how to live
amongst others, how to be a participating member in society,
(04:29):
and he saw that firsthand in some of the jobs
that she had to take on when they moved to Nassau,
when Reginald had become too old and too frail and
too sickly to work successfully, and she took all the
odd jobs she could to provide for the family. She
even took a job that pounded called pounding rock, basically
turning rock into powder. And she was the one who
(04:51):
was who especially insisted on sort of the personal codes
of respect for others, of looking out for your family.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
She enforced that one daily level in his life.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
And these were, you know, values, the values of his parents,
were values that would stick with him forever, you know.
Towards the end of his life, he was celebrated at
the Kennedy Center Honors and when everyone in the massive
theater was standing and applauding and cheering him, he stood
up and he looked up into the skies and you
could and you could see him mouth my mother, my father.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
So it was almost by.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
An accident of history that Sidney Potier had American citizenship.
He was born in Miami only because his parents had
sailed to Miami to sell their tomato crop, and Sydney
was not due to be born still for quite some time.
But then while they were in Miami, his mother, Evelyn,
gave birth to him prematurely, and it appeared that he
wasn't going to survive, to the point where his father
(05:49):
even went out and bought a tiny coffin to bury
him in that was no.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Bigger than a shoe box.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
But his mother fiercely insisted that Sydney would survive, that
he would live, and she he even went to the
point of visiting a soothsayer, a fortune tell and the
fortune teller assured her that he would live, that he
would grow on to do great things, that he would
even walk with kings, and Evelyn just sort of absorbed
(06:16):
that message. She took it as sort of an element
of faith, and she went back to her husband and said,
you know, no, this child's going to live.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
We're going to nurse him to health. And that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And you're listening to Aram Goodsuzian tell the story of
Sidney Potier, and what a story. Indeed, he grows up
in this idyllic, real remote part of the Bahamas called
cat Island, and he was able to roam free a
part of a rural family background, and every other family
was like it, lots of kids because they were labor
(06:46):
within all that time to roam free and imagine and
dream and play. And then he goes to Nassau, the
bigger city, and things start to turn south. He starts
to get into trouble. A boy do we learn a
lot about his mother and his father, and we already
start to understand more about this remarkable actor and his
life's work. And my goodness, watches movies now hearing what
(07:07):
we just heard, and you'll understand so much more about
Sidney Poitier's life.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
When we come back.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
More of the life story of Sidney Poitier here on
Our American Stories. Lee Habibe here the host of our
(07:33):
American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring
stories from across this great country, stories from our big
cities and small towns. But we truly can't do the
show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click
the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go
(07:56):
to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give And we continue
here with our American stories and with Aarm. Goodsuzian and
Aarm is the author of Sidney Poitier Man Actor Icon.
(08:19):
Let's return to aarm for more of the story.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Again, by this accident that he was born in Miami
that would end up having a transformative effect on his life,
because when Poitier made the choices that he made, that
sort of you could get him in trouble in the
way that happened to many black teenagers living in.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Nassau around that time.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It sort of stirred a family drama in that sense
because when he was fifteen years old, he was shipped
off back to Miami to live with a brother, Cyril,
who was already living there, and Sydney already had American citizenship,
so it paved a path for him to come to
the United States and that.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Began the next chapter in his life.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
In the Bahamas was a black majority, you know, the
majority of the population is black, and so there isn't
there weren't the same codes of segregation.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
There weren't the same codes of.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Direct racial exploitation that Sydney was very shocked to find
when he came to Miami, which was part of the
Jim Crow South. In this era, and he found himself
just absolutely flu mixed by not only legal segregation but
also the informal codes that.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Governed black life in the in the South.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
So one of the odd jobs that he picked up
when he moved to Miami was working as a delivery boy.
And the first time that he did a delivery in
a white neighborhood, he knocked on the front door.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
And the person who answered the door screamed at him
and told him to go to the back door. And
he had no idea why you would do that, but
that was the racial code of the time.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
A black person is not supposed to go to the
front door of a white person's home. And he was
so sort of flummoxed that he just left the delivery
at the front door and the bicycled away.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
So after some time in Miami, Sydney knew he wanted
to leave.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
He knew that the racial codes of the Deep South
were not for him.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
A need to get out of there, and he didn't
really even really know how to do it at first.
You know, he tried to hop on a train just
assuming that it would take him to the North, you know,
sort of living.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
By the sort of this mythical idea of you could
hop on a train to the north, and he would
often end up, you know, in the middle of nowhere. Ultimately,
he ended up taking a job at a resort outside
of Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked for a summer doing
menial labor, and that gave him enough money and enough
experience to figure out how to buy a train ticket
(10:33):
to go further north, and he bought a ticket to
New York. And so he shows up in New York.
He's still, you know, just a kid really and is
sort of searching for his way. He's in his late teens.
He doesn't know anyone in the city. While there are
many West Indian immigrants in Harlem at that time, the
Bahamian community was quite small there, so he didn't have
(10:55):
any natural context in that sense, and.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
So he showed up.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
He was able to or rent a room with some
of his scratchings, but wasn't able to sort of sustain it.
There were nights when he slept in pay toilets because
that was all he could afford to do. There are
nights when he slept on rooftops because he couldn't afford
a place to stay. He didn't have any warm clothes.
Because this was a kid who had grown up in
the Bahamas and then was in Miami. So when winter
(11:19):
hit it was particularly a tough for him, and so
he survived by doing odd jobs. The primary job that
he often did was work as a dishwasher in a restaurant,
and so it was you know, the way that he
found work was often by He'd pull out the New
York Amsterdam News, the black newspaper in New York City
and look at the help wanted section. And then one
day he came across this ad that said actors wanted
American Negro Theater.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
And he said, you know, I've been a dishwasher, I've
done all these other jobs. I'll try this. So Tire came.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
To the American Negro Theater, which was housed in the
one hundred and thirty fifth Street Library in the heart
of Harlem, and the person who answered the door was
Frederick O'Neill when he knocked on it, and Frederick O'Neill
was kind of this giant theater. He was one of
the founders of the American Negro Theater. Just this absolutely
intimidating figure.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
And he put poaier through an audition.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
And realized that he was a guy who had basically
no experience as an actor. Still spoke was kind of
a sing song West Indian accent, and as Patier remembers it, anyway,
Ordeoll kicked him out and said, wy, don't you go
get a.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Job as a dishwasher or something.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
And of course, because he had worked as a dishwasher,
he you know, this sort of burned in his soul.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
How could this guy say this to me? And so
he resolved that he was gonna become an actor.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
It was still sort of this quixotic idea for him
at the time, but he also had that sort of
code of personal discipline where he figured out how to
do it. He went back, he did some more auditions.
They needed more men because there were more women in
the troop than there were men, so they let him
sort of stick around. He worked as like, doing odd
jobs for the theater so that they would continue to
(12:53):
let him take the classes and become part of the organization,
and he trained himself to speak in a more American way.
He would imitate the voices on the radio. He would
go back to his small room and he would hear
the voice on the radio, say how do you do gentlemen?
And he would learn to say, how do you do gentlemen.
He also had in the other jobs that he worked,
(13:14):
and when he worked in a restaurant and he was
a dishwasher, and he was trying to learn how to read,
but he hadn't you know, he had just the basic
rudiments of it by the time that he was arriving
in Harlem in the nineteen forties. In one of the
restaurants that he worked at, there was a waiter, an
elderly Jewish man that he would later sort of credit
as having this incredibly important influence on his life, who
(13:35):
took a shine to him and agreed to try to
help him learn to read. So after they were done
with their shifts, they would sit down together and the
man would help him learn, and for party at this
had an enormous effect. He would have gone to become
a voracious reader. He would absorb information, he was constantly reading,
he was constantly entertained by ideas, and he was someone
who was, you know, sort of only half literate really
(13:56):
into his teenage years. So this is, you know, here's
he was just a story of one man's benevolence, having
a lasting effect on someone who would go on to
have national and international influence. After this long apprenticeship with
the American Negro Theater where he basically learned how to
be an actor, Poitier got his first break in the
late nineteen forties. He was cast in Anna Lucasta, which
(14:19):
was a play that the American Negro Theater had adapted
from a Polish play called Ana Lucaska and had turned
it into kind of a minor hit, and it started
to even play on Broadway. And then there were these
touring companies that went around the country, and Plie got
to join these touring companies and that was sort of
his baptism in the world of the black theater. And
so he was acting alongside people like Ossi Davis and
(14:39):
Ruby d you know, people who become lifelong friends. And
he got all sorts of experiences and you got to
see the United States as they traveled around, and was
able to earn some money. But into the late nineteen forties,
Poie's career.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Was very much piecemeal. He had, you know, a stage
opportunity here, a bit part in the play. Here.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
The American Negro Theater was starting to fall upon art
by the end of the nineteen forties because a lot
of its actors were using it as a launching pad
to get Broadway roles, and the American Negro Theater had
imagined itself as a independent black theater that was there
for the African American community, and so there was always
this constant tension.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Between uptown and downtown in that sense. And it was
also the beginnings of the.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Red Scare, and a lot of the people in Poitier's
milieu were part of that sort of leftist world.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Harlem was in many ways the center of radical political
activity in those early years of the Cold War. In fact,
the Communist Party moved its headquarters.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
To Harlem in the early nineteen fifties and.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
They established various organizations cultural organizations that were sponsored by
the Communist Party.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Some of the acting jobs that they got were through
this organization.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Called the Committee for the Negro in the Artists, which
kind of supplanted the American Negro Theatre as the primary
outlet for black theater talent. But it was an organization
that was a Communist front organization. It was funded by
the Communist Party. So this was the political world that
Poitier was negotiating just as his Hollywood career was starting
to take off.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
And we're listening to author Aaron Goodzuzi and tell the
story of Sydney Poitier. Aaron is a professor of history
at the University of Memphis, which again is just an
hour north of our home studios in Oxford, Mississippi. And
by the way, we asked him about whether Potier knew
whether he was working for a front group of the
Communist Party, and it was a no, And we just
(16:23):
wanted to clear that up, not trying to imply that
Poitier knew he was working for a front group of
the Communist Party. And by the way, what a life,
what a piece of storytelling. He experiences the heart of
segregation in Miami in the nineteen forties, and it's a
ruthless part and he couldn't believe it. It shocked him,
and he escaped to New York to live well wherever
(16:45):
he could, sleeping on rooftops in toilets. And then one
man saves his life, really, and that's Frederick O'Neill. He
doesn't give him a gold store for his crummy audition.
He tells him he's no good and thanks to Sydney's
father and mother, he has both the discipline, the resilience
and the perseverance to become the actor he'd always dreamed of.
(17:07):
It that rejection is important the city. When we come
back more of the life story of Sydney Poitier here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
(18:10):
stories and the story of Sidney Poitier, and we're talking
with Aaron Kotzuzian, who wrote the book Sidney Poitier Man
Actor kon Let's return to Aaron and more of the
life story of Sidney Poitier.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Play got his first break in Hollywood in nineteen forty
nine for a film that came out in nineteen fifty
called No Way Out. And No Way Out was at
the very end of a cycle of movies in Hollywood
that were known as message movies, movies that were designed
to combat racial prejudice. Gentlemen's Agreement is probably the most
famous of these movies, starring Gregory Peck that was about
anti Semitism, and No Way Out was a film in
(18:46):
which Poiitier played a doctor, a young doctor who had
treated a white patient who died and his brother was
vengeful and racist and was sort of out to get
Poitier as the doctor, and the end of this film,
Poitier's character admits to committing a murder just so that
there'll be an investigation in an autopsy into this body,
(19:09):
which will ultimately deffuse this this story. So he makes
this incredible sacrifice as this character. And in a lot
of ways, Patier's doctor in Noai outseets the template for
Prodier's entire career, basically his image, and it's in many
ways presenting a new black image on screen.
Speaker 5 (19:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
There were blacks who had been sort of sexual threats,
going back to movies like Birth of a Nation and
Party was not that at all. He played this very mannered,
middle class man who had a prim housewife. There were
characters who were song and dance men like Bill Robinson
for instance, and Paridi does not singer dances.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
He's a dramatic actor.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
There were characters who were sort of comic buffoons like
step and fetch It, and Protia's character was not that.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Again, he was this character who breathed.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Dignity, and he was not someone who was, you know,
who was threatening. You know, he wasn't violent. In fact,
he was sacrificial, right, So this film in the message
movie cycle, established a template where and established an image
for Poitier as this sort of good black man who
sacrifices on behalf of society and often helps out his
white co stars in a lot of ways. He became
(20:13):
kind of like a white liberals fancy of what a
black person should be like, and a white liberals construction
of if black people are like this, then how can
we not integrate into society? How can we not become
a more racially harmonious society. So he became a political
symbol in that sense.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
You know.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
After No Way Out, Poitier does find film roles here
and there, but he's still sort of struggling to squeak
out in existence in Hollywood, even to the point where
he opens a restaurant in Harlem called Ribs in the Rough,
a Ribs restaurant simply as a way as a backup plane.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
In case, in case acting doesn't work out.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
But then Partier gets his big break with the nineteen
fifty five film Blackboard Jungle, which is in the midst
of the sort of youth oriented films that are showing
appealing rebels if you think of Marlon Brando in The
Wild One or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
Poitier's character in Blackboard Jungle is a man named Gregory Miller,
who's a He's a teenager in a school in New
(21:08):
York and it's there's a bunch of rebellious boys who
are who are in this classroom. And Poitier's character is
electric in this room in the sense that.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
He's just he breathed cool. He is uh, he exudes
this this cool style, and.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
At first he's very resistant to the new white teacher
played by Glenn Ford, but the teacher recognizes in Poitier's
character this incredible ability to be a leader to sway
the whole classroom, and he basically courts him to his side.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
Hey, Miller, man, I wanta tough you a minute, Miller,
A man, a man's talker.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Miller.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
You know I've been looking up the records, and you're
a natural born leader.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
Yeah right, yeah, yeah, you are.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Those guys out there they like you very much.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Don't don't be modest with me, Miller.
Speaker 5 (21:59):
You know that you're a litle brighter, a little smarter
than the rest of those guys.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Right, Yeah, And every class needs a leader.
Speaker 5 (22:06):
You could be that leader, Miller.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
What you do, they'll do you cooperate and don't follow you.
How about it, Miller? Sure you think so? That's simple. Good,
that's fine, Miller. Take it easy, men sell Matt.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
So by the end of the film, Partier ends up
on the side of the teacher against the more villainous
white students who are against.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
The teacher and want a knife the teacher at the end.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
So here's a character who ends up embodying Pardier's typical
on screen persona the black man who helps the white
man to negotiate through this difficult arc in the white
person's career. But at the same time, he breeds such
electricity into the role. He brings such charisma into the
character of Gregory Miller that it becomes a role that vaults.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Him into the next level of his career.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
The film that really makes Sitting Body into a star,
that gives a top billing on a marque is The
Defiant Ones, a film.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
That comes out in nineteen fifty eight. It stars him
opposite Tony Curtis.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
They play prisoners, one white, one black, who are chained
to each other and they are able to escape from
a prison truck, and it's the story of their relationship.
They hate each other at first, race divides them. They're
each trying to scratch out some type of freedom, but
are chained to each other. And both characters earned Auscar
(23:33):
nominations for their role in this film. And again, just
like in Blackboard Jungle, we saw with Paidie with his
character in this film, Noah Cullen that he brings a
lot of subtlety to the role, sort of a humanity
to a character who could easily have become one dimensional.
And that's what makes it such a powerful film and
it's what makes it so appealing. At the same time,
(23:55):
this is a film that also plays into the Platier
pattern of sacrifice. At the end of the film, the
chain comes off the two of them and they're still
running away together and they're on a train. And at
the very end of the film, Party is able to
hop onto the train that's gonna take him to freedom,
and Tony Curs's character just can't make it.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
He's weak and wounded.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
So rather than ride off the freedom, Partier's character jumps
off the train and stays with his friend and cradles
them at the very end. And there's a terrific story
by James Baldwin about watching this film. The first time
he watches the film, he watches it in a downtown
New York theater.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Most of the patrons are white, and.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
At the end of the film, when Poutier leaps off
the train and stays with the white person, the audience
weeps and cheers and applauds, And as Baldwin reads it,
he says, you know, this is reassuring to them, This
is telling the black people are here for them, that
we're not going to disrupt them.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
And he rolls his eyes to some degree at that.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
And that's actually what prompts them to go see the
film for a second time in Harlem, Ming a primarily
black audience.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Of course, the movie goes the same way.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
Partie jumps off the train at the end, and this
time the audience gets up and hoots and hollers and says,
get back on the train, you fall. So by the
early sixties, Putty is certainly emerging as a significant movie star.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
He has appeared in the.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Defiant Ones, Poor Gean Bess. He was on Raisin in
the Sun, which had a long Broadway run, and then
was a successful film as well, in which he had
this incredible performance as Walter Lee Younger. He really defined
the role in terms of here's a young black man
who's coming into his own and learning how to provide
for his family and to show his dignity even as
he's facing an intensely racist society.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
And this is all of course occurring in the midst
of the rising civil rights movement.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
You have the student sit in movement of nineteen sixty
that spreads throughout the South, the Freedom Rides in nineteen
sixty one that bring integrated buses, and these demonstrations that
bring activists all throughout the Deep South. In nineteen sixty two,
you have James Meredith integrating the University of Mississippi, which
leads to a riot to try to prevent him from attending,
and ultimately federal marshals to protect him. So there's kind
(25:54):
of this early swelling momentum for the cause of African
American civil rights. And is the only black actor who
was obtaining leading roles in Hollywood films throughout this time,
so he essentially is emerging as Hollywood's response to the
civil rights film. He is how Hollywood deals with race
in the midst of the Civil Rights era, more or
less through the character.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
And icon of Sidney Poitier.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
And you've been listening to Aaron Goodzuzi and tell the
story of Sidney Poitier. No way out was his way
out in the end, and Richard Widmark played the part
of the antagonist. It was fascinating to listen to the
account of one of America's great black novelists and writers,
and that's James Baldwin tell the story of seeing this
(26:38):
movie in a white theater and a black theater and
the very different responses. What was remarkable about Poitier was
that he wasn't a song and dance man, the typical
African American song and dance man. He wasn't the comic,
the buffoon, nor was he threatening. He was something new
and something dangerous to everybody, something lovable to everybody. To
(27:00):
when we come back more of this remarkable story, when
we're talking about the life story of Sidney Potier. Here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
(27:39):
stories and with aarm Goodsuzian and he's the author of
Sidney Poitier, Man Actor Icon, And go to your local
bookstore and pick this up or order it through your
bookstore or go wherever you get your books. Let's pick
up now with aarm where he last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
And in nineteen sixty three he makes a film called
Lilli's of the Field.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
This is a low budget film.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
They only have two weeks to film the entire movie,
and it basically revolves around Partier's character, a man named
Homer Smith who's this traveling handyman in the American Southwest,
and he comes across a group of nuns, German nuns,
who basically ask him to build them a chapel, and
he ends up doing it, and he finds some kind
of sort of self worth in the story.
Speaker 4 (28:25):
It's it's an English lesson time.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I build a chapel, You build a chapel.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
You oh, we build a travel We mil a chapel.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
He be the chap amen Amen.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
A man, a man, a man. But also again, here's
the sort of classic Partier character, sort of divorced from
any kind of connection to a black community just on
his own, the sort of character of such innate goodness
that he ultimately builds a chapel for these nuns out
(29:10):
of the goodness of his heart and It is a
very heartwarming story. It's a sweet, well told story, but
it becomes something of a phenomenon, and part of it
is its political timing.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
It comes out in the fall of nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
This is in the aftermath of the March on Washington,
which was in August of that year, the massive demonstrations
for civil rights throughout the country, in the aftermath of
the violence in Birmingham, and so Poatier's character in that
film kind of captures a certain route, so to speak,
to the point where this is the film that gets
him the Oscar for Best Actor. He wins the Academy
(29:44):
Award in the spring of nineteen sixty four for Lilies
of the Field.
Speaker 5 (29:48):
The nominees for the Best Performance by an Actor Albert
Finney and Tom Jones, Richard Harris in This Sporting Life Wreck,
Harrison and Cleopatra, Paul.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Newman in Hu Sidney, Poitier in The Winner is Sidney, and.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
That, you know, creates new opportunities for Partier, It creates
new visibility. It also creates new complications because the civil
rights movement, as it continues to evolve, is approaching.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Something of a crossroads. Right.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
You have the philosophy of black power emerging by nineteen
sixty six and becoming more popular, and it emphasizes black
identity and black pride and some a certain sense of
disillusionment with the federal government, with white liberals, with you know,
sort of the mainstream themes of the Civil rights era
that Sydney Party had seemed to embody. And in each
of his films, Party continues to play some version of
(30:49):
the same kind of character that he's always played, and
each along the way he's breaking new barriers.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
In nineteen sixty seven, there's a poll that asks people,
would you go.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
See this film just knowing that this actor is in it?
And it turns out that Sidney Poidier ranks as the
most popular movie star in America based on this metric
at the end of nineteen sixty seven. And so there's
a sense of sort of racial crisis bubbling in America
over the course of the summer and into the fall
of nineteen sixty seven. And so at that point that
three Poitier movies come out in quick succession to Sir
(31:21):
with Love in the Heat of the Night and Guess
Who's Coming to Dinner, and each of these films in
its way, carries on the Sidney Poitier image, the Sidney
Poitier icon, So in a lot of ways, poitiers character
kind of seems to represent kind of like a.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Balm on those wounds.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
It soothes people's racial anxieties that black people can still
be their friend, can still be mannered, can still be helpful,
can still be non violent, It can still be Sidney Poidier.
And in the heat of the Night, which comes out
right after too Soar with Love builds on that idea.
Within this film, of course, is the famous so called
slap heard around the world, and where Poitier's character is
(31:59):
questioning this white aristocratic gentleman and Poitier's line of questioning
insults the man and he slaps Poitier, and Paridier's character
slaps him right back. And this is kind of a
watershed moment for many African American people viewers of the
time right, they've never been able to see this kind
of black action, this kind of black resentment rage expressed
on screen. But the larger pattern in the film is
(32:21):
still Podier working with whites.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Right, that aristocrat is kind of the outlier. He's the
villain in the story.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
All three of these films In the Heat of the Night,
To Show with Love and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,
all top number one of the box office, and so
Poidier is at this enormous peak of his start, and
then it kind of drops off a cliff, of course,
in April in nineteen sixty eight, that's when Martin Luther
King was assassinated. And at the time many people are
seeing this as sort of the end of an era, right,
(32:50):
and the philosophy of nonviolence is somewhat run its course.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
There's a deep sense of disillusion among many Black Americans
and rage of course as well.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
But what's also happening by the late nineteen sixties is
that you have more and more black critics shaped by
black power, who are increasingly and openly critical of Poitier.
And the most significant of the of these criticisms comes
from a playwright, a guy named Clifford Mason, writing the
New York Times toward the end of nineteen sixty seven,
(33:18):
and the big headline in the New York Times that
day was why does white America.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Love Sidney Poitier?
Speaker 5 (33:23):
So?
Speaker 3 (33:24):
And it's a brutal takedown of so many of Poitier's films,
and it includes some really harsh language against Poitier.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Critics are wondering, is Sidney Potuti obsolete? You know?
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Can you no longer you know, barely be a viable character,
because he continues to present this kind of image on
screen in the early seventies, And it's right around that
time that we're seeing a new type of black hero
appear on screen in the black exploitation movies in Shaft
and Superfly, and they're creating sort of an emotional resonance
with a lot of Black audiences at the time.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
They'd never really seen.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
These kinds of characters on screen before, and so it's
rushing too many African American audiences.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
But Partier feels a sting from this.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
In fact, he moves to the Bahamas at some point
in the early nineteen seventies for a few years, basically
to just sort of get away from this sort of
the political.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Heat that has been established here.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
But he's also exceptionally resourceful, very intelligent connections all through Holliday.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
He runs the most powerful black.
Speaker 3 (34:20):
Man in Hollywood in the nineteen seventies, and so he
uses that leverage in some ways that in ways that
don't necessarily help his career but help the larger plight
of race on screen. So he does a trio of comedies,
for instance, Uptime Saturday Night, a piece of the Action
Let's Do It Again, that star Bill Cosby, and have
Harry Belfonte and a few of them Jimmy Walker. And
(34:41):
these are really sort of feel good movies that aren't
in the blaxploitation tradition.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
They're crossing over.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
They're esceptionally popular among black audiences, but they're also winning
white audiences. And Party is directing these films, and he's
you know, he's the one who's getting black people not
just in front of the screens, but behind the cameras too.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
He's employing more black people in Hollywood and have really
been employed.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
But also as he was able to sort of get
some distance, as he was able to tell his own story,
as he became kind of a veteran in Black Hollywood,
a mentor to actors like Denzel Washington or Will Smith
to the point where he's winning a Lifetime Achievement OSCAR
in the early two thousands, and you know, he's.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Able to sort of reflect back.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
He writes a couple of memoirs that tell the story
of his life. So like anyone who's approaching past middle
age and into their older years, he's able to look
back with pride on his accomplishments. And also because the
United States itself gets distanced from that tumultuous time, it's
easier to appreciate the contributions that Sydney Partier made in
a way that might have been difficult for.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Many Americans to see in the early nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
For instance.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
So there is this more sort of long standing appreciation
of a Partier's career that we see, you know, with
his recent passing, it was the tone was naturally celebratory
because he had been a barrier breaker, and he'd had
to negotiate through these difficult times and make difficult choices
that would have been a burden on anyone, and he'd
manage it with much more grace and style and.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Dignity then I think we have the right to expect.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
So it's two thousand and three and Barack Obama at
this point is still very much an underdog candidate for
the Senate. He's running in Illinois, of course, and his
campaign manager is running these various focus groups and you know,
the black candidates in Illinois political history had been able
to appeal primarily to a black insiduacy, but hadn't been
able to cross over. And his campign managers running this
(36:33):
focus group in particular with this group of white women
who are wealthy on the north shore of Chicago and
showing them images of the various candidates and what they
think about him. And when they showed them the picture
of Obama and they say, what does this make you
think about? One of the women says Sidney Pacier. And
it's at that moment that the campaign manager, Jim Cawley.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Says, WHOA, this is real. Here's a guy with actual
crossover appeal.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
And one more example of the ways in which Sidney
Poitier has shaped the patterns of American life and the
way that he has sort of appealed to the best
in our nature.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
And a great job on the production by Greg Hengler.
In a special thanks to Aaron Goodsuzian for his book
and his effort here telling the story, sharing the story
of Sidney Poitier. His book Sydney Potier Man Actor Icon
and well buy the book and if it's not there,
order it from your local bookstore or wherever you get
(37:33):
your books. The Defiant Ones, if you've never seen it,
see it. It gets him his first Oscar nomination, along
with the great Tony Curtis. Lilies of the Field gets
him his first Oscar And in nineteen sixty seven, My
Goodness to Serve with Love in the heat of the night,
Guess Who's coming to dinner? Watch all three films with
your family. And what Poitier had to face. The Black
(37:54):
Power movement didn't like him, and he was a threat
and to challenge to many white racists. And he held
that line and taught us all how to live and
to live with grace. In the end, Aaron was right.
He has appealed through his work for the best in
our nature. The story of Sidney Poitier here on our
American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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