The Accidental American

James was a farmer and cab driver on Cat Island in the Bahamas a hundred years ago.  Now and then he would travel to Miami, Florida to sell produce.   In the winter of 1926/27, James was planning such a trip and asked his wife, Evelyn, along.  Evelyn was pregnant, but with two months to go they felt it was safe for her to join James for the trip.

They were wrong.

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During their trip, Evelyn went into labor and gave birth to a baby boy on February 20, 1927.  Born two months premature, the doctors didn’t think little Sidney had much chance of survival.

To give their baby a better opportunity at survival, the couple stayed in Miami for three months to nurse him to health, then took him back to Cat Island, where he grew into a strong, intelligent child…one with dual citizenship.  Because of his accidental birth in Miami to Bahamian parents, little Sidney was both British (the Bahamas were a British Crown colony at the time) and American.

When the boy was ten, his family relocated to Nassau where he was first exposed to the modern world, with its cars, electricity, and movies.  Five years later fifteen-year-old Sidney was sent to Miami to live with an older brother.  At sixteen he moved to New York City and got a job as a dishwasher.  A waiter took an interest in the boy and helped him improve his reading skills.

The U.S. entered World War II and, in 1943, Sidney lied about his age to join the Army, where he worked at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Northport, New York with psychiatric patients.  He became quite upset at the way the military patients were treated and sought a discharge.  By faking a mental problem, he was released from the Army in 1944. 

He went back to washing dishes, but he wanted more.

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Sidney thought perhaps acting was his road to the future.  There were a few problems with that idea though.  One, he had an obvious Bahamian accent.  By working hard he was able to master the American form of English.

His second roadblock was that he was tone deaf in that era of the musical.  Not much he could do about that, except try to avoid singing parts.

Third, he was a black man in a white world.  Remember, this was the 1940s.  There were not a lot of roles for black actors in Hollywood at the time, and most of those were for Pullman porters, butlers, or simple-minded funnymen.  The young man didn’t want any of those.  He wanted roles that would raise standards for black people.  As he said in 1999, “I decided in my life that I would do nothing that did not reflect positively on my father’s life. That is where I got the ‘I will not do this, I will not do that.’ I just said no.”

And say no he did, turning down roles that so many other African American actors were forced to take on if they wanted to work.

After doing some theater work through Harlem’s American Negro Theatre and on Broadway, he caught Hollywood’s eye.  In 1950 Sidney got a lead role in his first major film, No Way Out.  In that movie he played a doctor in a police ward who had to treat white racists.  Despite the peace-loving, positive role he played in the movie, it was banned in some theaters, like Chicago, where it was feared that the movie, “could cause trouble.”

It wasn’t the last time Sidney Poitier would be faced with the perils of racism in the workplace.

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In 1955, at the age of 28, Sidney took on his breakout role as a juvenile delinquent in Blackboard Jungle.  In the film Glenn Ford played a young school teacher who broke through frustration to connect with some troubled youth (including Mr. Poitier) and help them turn their lives around.

He would later play opposite Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones.  The two played escaped prisoners who were shackled together.  They had to overcome their hatred for each other to cooperate in order to survive.

Although a large proportion of his roles dealt directly with racism, not all did.  In Lilies of the Field (1963) he was a transient handyman who got manipulated by German-speaking nuns into helping build a chapel in the desert southwest.

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Sidney Poitier received many awards and honors, including being the first black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.  He got a Grammy Award, a pair of Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award.  He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994.  He received the Academy Honorary Award for lifetime achievement in 2001.

 Among the many great movies he made, I would recommend anyone who is not familiar with Poitier to watch the ones I named above, and check out To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.  Although obviously products of their era, these movies stand the test of time and have earned a place among the best movies of all time.

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Sidney Poitier passed away on January 6, 2022, surrounded by friends and loved ones at his home in Los Angeles, California, aged 94 years.  He will be missed but, with his many tremendous movies surviving, he won’t be forgotten.

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