who ran the movies realized that America was passing them by. The birth of a nation, all right—but with afros and Black Studies programs, civil rights bills and martyrs. It certainly appeared that the Hollywood power brokers had missed a whole movement. Which is why the story of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier—who knew well the struggle of those artists flattened on the roads behind them—is so potent: they broke through before the streets caught fire. Their very presence couldn’t help but to nick at the conscience of Hollywood, a place far enough from the murderous small towns of the Deep South as to seem almost in another world.
One can only imagine the amazing and yet lonely trajectory of Sidney Poitier, the first black male movie star in the Hollywood studio system. Poitier honed his skills at the American Negro Theater in Harlem in the 1940s; Harry Belafonte was a fellow acting student and had starring roles in Carmen Jones and Island in the Sun. Poitier went west, and small movie roles led, in 1958, to a costarring turn in The Defiant Ones opposite Tony Curtis, for which Poitier became the first black man to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor.
Looking back at the American calendar and the role Negroes—the popular term used then—played in society in 1963, one finds more than a few freeze-frame moments to seize upon. That year—Eugene Allen the butler would have been on his job for eleven years—marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of American slavery. There was an Emancipation Proclamation event in honor of the occasion at the White House. It did not get much attention in the mainstream media, however, because its lens was focused instead on Birmingham, Alabama, where on September 15, at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Klansmen had set a bomb in reaction against the settlement between the city and the demonstrators who had fought against segregation with protests and boycotts. Four girls, in their Sunday finery, were killed. Martyrs in the struggle, they joined the likes of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and all the other foot soldiers on the march toward equality. They became sad emblems of the struggle for equal rights in America. Real-life America was just too dangerous for Hollywood’s fictions.
In that very year, Sidney Poitier appeared in Lilies of the Field, in the role of Homer Smith, playing an itinerant, out-of-work construction worker who helps a group of German nuns build a chapel. The movie opened on the big screen. And for many families—especially Negro families, mine included—it would become an annual staple of familytelevision time, the rare movie with a black lead that had become a rite of cinematic passage. Not unlike The Wizard of Oz for so many other households.
The script of Lilies of the Field grew out of William E. Barrett’s lovely little 127-page novella of the same name. The New York Times Book Review described the book, which was published in 1962, as “a contemporary fable.” Fable or not, black America now saw a figure on screen who wasn’t kowtowing, a man who set his own hours in the world, a man who seemed to roam the earth free and easy. Poitier received an Oscar nomination for best actor for his performance in the movie. His fellow nominees in the category were Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Paul Newman, and Rex Harrison.
Poitier did not dare imagine he could win, and when Anne Bancroft opened the envelope on Oscar night and uttered Poitier’s name, it cascaded far beyond the confines of the Santa Monica Auditorium that evening. No one was more surprised than Poitier. This was cinema and history and a breakthrough, but also a balm for the pain in the streets.“It has been a long journey to this moment,” Poitier said from the podium, in words that seemed to swoop up an entire race of people.“We black people had done it,” he would later write of that evening. “We were capable. We forget sometimes, having to persevere against
One can only imagine the amazing and yet lonely trajectory of Sidney Poitier, the first black male movie star in the Hollywood studio system. Poitier honed his skills at the American Negro Theater in Harlem in the 1940s; Harry Belafonte was a fellow acting student and had starring roles in Carmen Jones and Island in the Sun. Poitier went west, and small movie roles led, in 1958, to a costarring turn in The Defiant Ones opposite Tony Curtis, for which Poitier became the first black man to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor.
Looking back at the American calendar and the role Negroes—the popular term used then—played in society in 1963, one finds more than a few freeze-frame moments to seize upon. That year—Eugene Allen the butler would have been on his job for eleven years—marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of American slavery. There was an Emancipation Proclamation event in honor of the occasion at the White House. It did not get much attention in the mainstream media, however, because its lens was focused instead on Birmingham, Alabama, where on September 15, at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Klansmen had set a bomb in reaction against the settlement between the city and the demonstrators who had fought against segregation with protests and boycotts. Four girls, in their Sunday finery, were killed. Martyrs in the struggle, they joined the likes of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and all the other foot soldiers on the march toward equality. They became sad emblems of the struggle for equal rights in America. Real-life America was just too dangerous for Hollywood’s fictions.
In that very year, Sidney Poitier appeared in Lilies of the Field, in the role of Homer Smith, playing an itinerant, out-of-work construction worker who helps a group of German nuns build a chapel. The movie opened on the big screen. And for many families—especially Negro families, mine included—it would become an annual staple of familytelevision time, the rare movie with a black lead that had become a rite of cinematic passage. Not unlike The Wizard of Oz for so many other households.
The script of Lilies of the Field grew out of William E. Barrett’s lovely little 127-page novella of the same name. The New York Times Book Review described the book, which was published in 1962, as “a contemporary fable.” Fable or not, black America now saw a figure on screen who wasn’t kowtowing, a man who set his own hours in the world, a man who seemed to roam the earth free and easy. Poitier received an Oscar nomination for best actor for his performance in the movie. His fellow nominees in the category were Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Paul Newman, and Rex Harrison.
Poitier did not dare imagine he could win, and when Anne Bancroft opened the envelope on Oscar night and uttered Poitier’s name, it cascaded far beyond the confines of the Santa Monica Auditorium that evening. No one was more surprised than Poitier. This was cinema and history and a breakthrough, but also a balm for the pain in the streets.“It has been a long journey to this moment,” Poitier said from the podium, in words that seemed to swoop up an entire race of people.“We black people had done it,” he would later write of that evening. “We were capable. We forget sometimes, having to persevere against
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