May 27, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Sidney Poitier's elegant bearing and principled onscreen characters made him Hollywood's first black movie star and the first black man to win the best actor Oscar. 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.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Primarily rural, agricultural 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
Puaidiet or Rome. Sidney was the youngest of seven children.
(01:35):
I think there were five brothers and two sisters. The
oldest brother, Cyril, was about fifteen years older than he was.
And having a big family like the Poitiers was more
the rule than the exception on cat Island because therese
were farming families for the most part.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
You know, the more children you had, the more people
you could put to work.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
For young children, Cat Island was a gigantic playground. After chores,
Sitney off from roam the island unsupervised, wandering down narrow
flower line paths, 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
(02:34):
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 until they disappeared, and then I'd just stare
at that line and dream.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I was a real dreamer. 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.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
At that line.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
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 his body, as he put it,
that would benefited him in.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
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 Poidier really started to have
to endure more struggles. He was growing into his teenage years.
But now he was in an urban environment, he would
sometimes engage in petty crime and he ran into trouble
(03:29):
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 Poitier, 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 cat Island
and just was used to backbreaking labor, and his father
(03:51):
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 Sydney
as he grew into his elthood as he reflected on
his own life later on, that was the big legacy
(04:14):
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,
and he saw that firsthand in some of the jobs
that she had to take on when they moved to Nassau,
(04:34):
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
was who especially insisted on sort of the personal codes
(04:55):
of respect for others, of looking out for your family.
She enforced that one daily level in his life. And
these were, you know, values, the values of his parents,
were values that would stick with him forever, you know.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Toward the end of his life, he.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
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. So it was almost by an accident of
history that Sidney Potier had American citizenship. He was born
(05:31):
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 even went
out and bought a tiny coffin to bury him in
(05:52):
that was no bigger than a shoe box. 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 chell, 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,
(06:14):
and Evelyn just sort of absorbed that message.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
She took it as.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Sort of an element of faith, and she went back
to her husband and said, you know, no, this child's
going to live. We're going to nurse him to health.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And you're listening to Aram Goodsuzian tell the story of
Sidney Poitier, and.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
What a story.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
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 within all that time to roam
free and imagine and dream and play. And then he
(06:51):
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. My goodness, watches movies now
hearing what 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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(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 Potier 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 Poiitier made the choices that he made
that sort of could get him in trouble in the
way that happened to many black teenagers living.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
In 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 began the next chapter in
his life. In the Bahamas was a black majority, you know,
(09:01):
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 governed black life in the
in the South. So one of the odd jobs that
(09:27):
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 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.
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
(09:48):
at the front door and then bicycled away. So after
some time in Miami, Sydney knew that he wanted to leave.
He knew that the racial codes of the Deep.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
South were not for him. A need to get out.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Of there, but 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 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
(10:27):
menial labor, and that gave him enough money and enough
experience to figure out how to buy a train ticket
to go further north, and he bought a ticket to
New York.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
And so he shows up in New York.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
He's still, you know, just a kid really and is
sort of searching for his way.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
He's in his late teens.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
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
any natural context in that sense, and so he showed up.
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
(11:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
He didn't have any warm clothes. Because this was a
kid who.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Had grown up in the Bahamas and then was in Miami.
So when winter hit it was particularly 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 would
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
(11:37):
said actors wanted American Negro Theater. And he said, you know,
I've been a dishwasher, I've done all these other jobs.
I'll try this.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So Pier came.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
To the American Negro Theater, which was housed in the
one hundred and thirty fifth Steet.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Library in the heart of Harlem, and.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
The person who answered the door was Frederick O'Neill when
he knocked on it. And Frederick O'Neill was kind of
this giant black theater. He was one of the founders
of the American Negro Theater, just this absolutely intimidating figure,
and he put Poitier through an audition and realized that
he was a guy who had basically.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
No experience as an actor.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
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 job as
a dishwasher or something. And of course, because Sidney had
worked as a dishwasher, he you know, this sort of
burned in his soul. How could this guy say this
to me?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
And so he resolved that he was gonna become an actor.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
You know, 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 go on 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 sort of only half literate really into his
(13:57):
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 was a play
(14:19):
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 Ruby d you know,
(14:40):
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 was very
much piecemeal.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
He had, you know, a stage.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Opportunity here, a bit part in the play here. 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 between Uptown and downtown in that sense.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
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 2 (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. Some of the acting jobs that he
got were through this organization 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 fund organization.
It was funded by the Communist Party. So this was
(15:57):
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 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 Potier 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 Out sets the template
for Prodier's entire career, basically his image, and it's in
many ways presenting a new black image on screen.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
There were blacks who had been sort of sexual threats
that are going back to movies like Birth of a
Nation and PARTI 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 Pardi does not singer dances.
He's a dramatic actor. There were characters who were sort
of comic buffoons like step and Fetchet, and Prodia's character
(19:49):
was not that.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Again, he was this character who.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Breathed 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 establish 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. You know, after No Way Out,
Poitier does find film roles here and there, but he's
(20:34):
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 in case, in
case acting doesn't work out. 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
(20:55):
oriented films that are showing appealing rebels.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
If you think of Marlon Brando in The Wild One
or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Poitier's character in Blackboard Jungle is a man named Gregory
Miller who's a He's a teenager in a school in
New York and it's there's a bunch of rebellious boys
who are who are in this classroom.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
And Poitier's character.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Is electric in this role in the sense that he's
just he breathed cool.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
He is uh, he exudes this.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
This cool style, and 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, come, man, I wanna talk you a minute. Miller,
Man a man's talker.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Miller.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
You know I've been uh looking up the records, and
you're a natural born leader. Yeah right, yeah, yeah, you are.
Those guys out there, they like you very much. Don't
don't be modest with me, Miller. You know that you're
the litle brighter, a little smarter than the rest of
those guys. Right, yeah, And every class needs a leader.
You could be that leader, Miller. What you do, they'll
do you cooperate and don't follow you.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
How about it?
Speaker 5 (22:13):
Mother? Sure you think so? That's simple? Good, that's fine, Miller,
Take it easy, man s Matt.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
So.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
By the end of the film, Partier ends up on
the side of the teacher against the more villainous white
students who are against the teacher and want a knife
the teacher at the end. So here's a character who
ends up embodying Partier's typical on screen persona the black
man who helps the white man to negotiate through this
(22:48):
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 Bloody 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.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
It stars him opposite Tony Curtis. 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
(23:31):
both characters earned AUSTAR nominations for their role in this film.
And again, just like in Blackboard Jungle, we saw with
Paidier 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
(23:54):
the same time, 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.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
That, 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 fam So by the
early sixties, Putty is certainly emerging as a significant movie star.
He has appeared in 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,
(25:13):
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. And
this is all, of course occurring in the midst of
the rising.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
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 Pity 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 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 Poitier. 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
Lilies of the Field. This is a low budget film.
They only have two weeks to film the entire movie,
and it basically revolves around Partier's character, a man named
Homer Smith, who is 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
(28:21):
he ends up doing it and he finds some kind
of sort of self worth in the story.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
It's it's English lesson time. I build a chapel, You
build a chapel.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
You oh, we build a travel We the chapel. He
be the chap amen Amen, A man, a.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Man, a man.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
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 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,
(29:18):
and part of it is its political timing. It comes
out in the fall of nineteen sixty three. 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 root, so to speak, to the
(29:39):
point where this is the film though that gets him
the Oscar for Best Actor. He wins the Academy Award
in the spring of nineteen sixty four for Lilies of
the Field.
Speaker 4 (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 Cleopastra, Paul Newman in Hu Sidney, Poitier in
the winner is Sidney, and that, you.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
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 something of a crossroads.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
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 a 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
(30:48):
version of the same kind of character that he's always played,
and each along the way he's breaking new barriers. In
nineteen sixty seven, there's a poll that asks people, would
you go see this film just.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Knowing that this actor is in it?
Speaker 3 (31:02):
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
with Love in the Heat of the Night and Guess
(31:23):
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, Poitier's character
kind of seems to represent kind of.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Like a balm on those wounds.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
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 herd 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 Poidier's character
slaps him right back.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
And this is kind of a watershed.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
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 still Podier working
with whites. Right, that aristocrat is kind of the outlier.
He's the villain in the story. All three of these
films in the Heat of the Night Too, Show with
(32:31):
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, and the
philosophy of nonviolence is somewhat run its course.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
There's a deep sense of disillusion.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Among many Black Americans and rage of course as well.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
But what's also.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
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, and the big
headline in the New York Times that day was why
(33:21):
does white America.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Love Sidney Poitier 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. Critics
are wondering, is Sidney Potuti obsolete?
Speaker 4 (33:37):
You know?
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Can he no longer 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
super Fly, and they're creating sort of an emotional resonance
with a lot of Black audiences at the time. They'd
never really seen these kinds of characters on screen before,
(33:59):
and so it's real rushing too many African American audiences.
But Partier feels a sting from this. 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 heat.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
That has been established here.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
But he's also exceptionally resourceful, very intelligent connections all through Holliday.
He runs the most powerful black 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,
(34:35):
a piece of the Action, Let's Do It Again, that
star Bill Cosby, and have Harry.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Belfonte and a few of them Jimmy Walker.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
And these are really sort of feel good movies that
aren't in the black exploitation tradition. They're crossing over. They're
esceptionally popular among black audiences, but they're also winning white audiences.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
And Party is directing these films.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Black people in Hollywood and have really been employed. 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 able to
sort of reflect back. He writes a couple of memoirs
(35:19):
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 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 Parier'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 dignity then
(36:02):
I think.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
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 instiduency, but hadn't been
able to cross over. And his campig 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 says, WHOA,
(36:53):
this is real. Here's a guy with actual crossover appeal.
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.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
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 Sidney 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.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
If you've never seen it, see it.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
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 Power movement
didn't like him, and he was a threat and to
(37:56):
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 to 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.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Primarily rural, agricultural 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
Puaidiet or Rome. Sidney was the youngest of seven children.
(01:35):
I think there were five brothers and two sisters. The
oldest brother, Cyril, was about fifteen years older than he was.
And having a big family like the Poitiers was more
the rule than the exception on cat Island because therese
were farming families for the most part.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
You know, the more children you had, the more people
you could put to work.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
For young children, Cat Island was a gigantic playground. After chores,
Sitney off from roam the island unsupervised, wandering down narrow
flower line paths, 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
(02:34):
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 until they disappeared, and then I'd just stare
at that line and dream.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
I was a real dreamer. 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.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
At that line.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
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 his body, as he put it,
that would benefited him in.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
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 Poidier really started to have
to endure more struggles. He was growing into his teenage years.
But now he was in an urban environment, he would
sometimes engage in petty crime and he ran into trouble
(03:29):
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 Poitier, 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 cat Island
and just was used to backbreaking labor, and his father
(03:51):
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 Sydney
as he grew into his elthood as he reflected on
his own life later on, that was the big legacy
(04:14):
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,
and he saw that firsthand in some of the jobs
that she had to take on when they moved to Nassau,
(04:34):
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
was who especially insisted on sort of the personal codes
(04:55):
of respect for others, of looking out for your family.
She enforced that one daily level in his life. And
these were, you know, values, the values of his parents,
were values that would stick with him forever, you know.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Toward the end of his life, he.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
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. So it was almost by an accident of
history that Sidney Potier had American citizenship. He was born
(05:31):
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 even went
out and bought a tiny coffin to bury him in
(05:52):
that was no bigger than a shoe box. 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 chell, 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,
(06:14):
and Evelyn just sort of absorbed that message.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
She took it as.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Sort of an element of faith, and she went back
to her husband and said, you know, no, this child's
going to live. We're going to nurse him to health.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
And you're listening to Aram Goodsuzian tell the story of
Sidney Poitier, and.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
What a story.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
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 within all that time to roam
free and imagine and dream and play. And then he
(06:51):
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. My goodness, watches movies now
hearing what 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 Potier 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 Poiitier made the choices that he made
that sort of could get him in trouble in the
way that happened to many black teenagers living.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
In 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 began the next chapter in
his life. In the Bahamas was a black majority, you know,
(09:01):
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 governed black life in the
in the South. So one of the odd jobs that
(09:27):
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 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.
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
(09:48):
at the front door and then bicycled away. So after
some time in Miami, Sydney knew that he wanted to leave.
He knew that the racial codes of the Deep.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
South were not for him. A need to get out.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Of there, but 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 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
(10:27):
menial labor, and that gave him enough money and enough
experience to figure out how to buy a train ticket
to go further north, and he bought a ticket to
New York.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
And so he shows up in New York.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
He's still, you know, just a kid really and is
sort of searching for his way.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
He's in his late teens.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
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
any natural context in that sense, and so he showed up.
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
(11:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
He didn't have any warm clothes. Because this was a
kid who.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Had grown up in the Bahamas and then was in Miami.
So when winter hit it was particularly 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 would
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
(11:37):
said actors wanted American Negro Theater. And he said, you know,
I've been a dishwasher, I've done all these other jobs.
I'll try this.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So Pier came.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
To the American Negro Theater, which was housed in the
one hundred and thirty fifth Steet.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Library in the heart of Harlem, and.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
The person who answered the door was Frederick O'Neill when
he knocked on it. And Frederick O'Neill was kind of
this giant black theater. He was one of the founders
of the American Negro Theater, just this absolutely intimidating figure,
and he put Poitier through an audition and realized that
he was a guy who had basically.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
No experience as an actor.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
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 job as
a dishwasher or something. And of course, because Sidney had
worked as a dishwasher, he you know, this sort of
burned in his soul. How could this guy say this
to me?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
And so he resolved that he was gonna become an actor.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
You know, 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 go on 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 sort of only half literate really into his
(13:57):
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 was a play
(14:19):
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 Ruby d you know,
(14:40):
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 was very
much piecemeal.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
He had, you know, a stage.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Opportunity here, a bit part in the play here. 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 between Uptown and downtown in that sense.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
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 2 (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. Some of the acting jobs that he
got were through this organization 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 fund organization.
It was funded by the Communist Party. So this was
(15:57):
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 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 Potier 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 Out sets the template
for Prodier's entire career, basically his image, and it's in
many ways presenting a new black image on screen.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
There were blacks who had been sort of sexual threats
that are going back to movies like Birth of a
Nation and PARTI 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 Pardi does not singer dances.
He's a dramatic actor. There were characters who were sort
of comic buffoons like step and Fetchet, and Prodia's character
(19:49):
was not that.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Again, he was this character who.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Breathed 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 establish 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. You know, after No Way Out,
Poitier does find film roles here and there, but he's
(20:34):
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 in case, in
case acting doesn't work out. 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
(20:55):
oriented films that are showing appealing rebels.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
If you think of Marlon Brando in The Wild One
or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Poitier's character in Blackboard Jungle is a man named Gregory
Miller who's a He's a teenager in a school in
New York and it's there's a bunch of rebellious boys
who are who are in this classroom.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
And Poitier's character.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Is electric in this role in the sense that he's
just he breathed cool.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
He is uh, he exudes this.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
This cool style, and 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, come, man, I wanna talk you a minute. Miller,
Man a man's talker.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Miller.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
You know I've been uh looking up the records, and
you're a natural born leader. Yeah right, yeah, yeah, you are.
Those guys out there, they like you very much. Don't
don't be modest with me, Miller. You know that you're
the litle brighter, a little smarter than the rest of
those guys. Right, yeah, And every class needs a leader.
You could be that leader, Miller. What you do, they'll
do you cooperate and don't follow you.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
How about it?
Speaker 5 (22:13):
Mother? Sure you think so? That's simple? Good, that's fine, Miller,
Take it easy, man s Matt.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
So.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
By the end of the film, Partier ends up on
the side of the teacher against the more villainous white
students who are against the teacher and want a knife
the teacher at the end. So here's a character who
ends up embodying Partier's typical on screen persona the black
man who helps the white man to negotiate through this
(22:48):
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 Bloody 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.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
It stars him opposite Tony Curtis. 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
(23:31):
both characters earned AUSTAR nominations for their role in this film.
And again, just like in Blackboard Jungle, we saw with
Paidier 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
(23:54):
the same time, 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.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
That, 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 fam So by the
early sixties, Putty is certainly emerging as a significant movie star.
He has appeared in 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,
(25:13):
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. And
this is all, of course occurring in the midst of
the rising.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
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 Pity 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 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 Poitier. 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
Lilies of the Field. This is a low budget film.
They only have two weeks to film the entire movie,
and it basically revolves around Partier's character, a man named
Homer Smith, who is 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
(28:21):
he ends up doing it and he finds some kind
of sort of self worth in the story.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
It's it's English lesson time. I build a chapel, You
build a chapel.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
You oh, we build a travel We the chapel. He
be the chap amen Amen, A man, a.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Man, a man.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
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 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,
(29:18):
and part of it is its political timing. It comes
out in the fall of nineteen sixty three. 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 root, so to speak, to the
(29:39):
point where this is the film though that gets him
the Oscar for Best Actor. He wins the Academy Award
in the spring of nineteen sixty four for Lilies of
the Field.
Speaker 4 (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 Cleopastra, Paul Newman in Hu Sidney, Poitier in
the winner is Sidney, and that, you.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
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 something of a crossroads.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
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 a 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
(30:48):
version of the same kind of character that he's always played,
and each along the way he's breaking new barriers. In
nineteen sixty seven, there's a poll that asks people, would
you go see this film just.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Knowing that this actor is in it?
Speaker 3 (31:02):
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
with Love in the Heat of the Night and Guess
(31:23):
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, Poitier's character
kind of seems to represent kind of.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Like a balm on those wounds.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
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 herd 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 Poidier's character
slaps him right back.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
And this is kind of a watershed.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
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 still Podier working
with whites. Right, that aristocrat is kind of the outlier.
He's the villain in the story. All three of these
films in the Heat of the Night Too, Show with
(32:31):
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, and the
philosophy of nonviolence is somewhat run its course.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
There's a deep sense of disillusion.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Among many Black Americans and rage of course as well.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
But what's also.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
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, and the big
headline in the New York Times that day was why
(33:21):
does white America.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Love Sidney Poitier 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. Critics
are wondering, is Sidney Potuti obsolete?
Speaker 4 (33:37):
You know?
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Can he no longer 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
super Fly, and they're creating sort of an emotional resonance
with a lot of Black audiences at the time. They'd
never really seen these kinds of characters on screen before,
(33:59):
and so it's real rushing too many African American audiences.
But Partier feels a sting from this. 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 heat.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
That has been established here.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
But he's also exceptionally resourceful, very intelligent connections all through Holliday.
He runs the most powerful black 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,
(34:35):
a piece of the Action, Let's Do It Again, that
star Bill Cosby, and have Harry.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Belfonte and a few of them Jimmy Walker.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
And these are really sort of feel good movies that
aren't in the black exploitation tradition. They're crossing over. They're
esceptionally popular among black audiences, but they're also winning white audiences.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
And Party is directing these films.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Black people in Hollywood and have really been employed. 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 able to
sort of reflect back. He writes a couple of memoirs
(35:19):
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 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 Parier'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 dignity then
(36:02):
I think.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
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 instiduency, but hadn't been
able to cross over. And his campig 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 says, WHOA,
(36:53):
this is real. Here's a guy with actual crossover appeal.
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.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
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 Sidney 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.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
If you've never seen it, see it.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
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 Power movement
didn't like him, and he was a threat and to
(37:56):
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 to the best in our nature.
The story of Sidney Poitier here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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