Sidney Poitier learned to read at 16 and worked as a busboy becoming the first black man win Oscar

Sydney Poitier, the trailblazing Hollywood icon and towering civil rights activist, has died at the age of 94. He leaves behind an outsized legacy on the silver screen, in addition to a seven-decade-long career dedicated to advancing racial equality and human dignity. 

Poitier’s cool, dignified eloquence, silky voice and natural charisma made him an instant star in Hollywood. He shattered stereotypes and took on roles that broke barriers, paving the way for minority actors in generations to come. ‘I’ll always be following your in your footsteps,’ said Denzel Washington during his 2001 Academy Award acceptance speech. ‘There’s nothing I’d rather do, sir.’

Poitier’s commanding onscreen presence and searing good looks would make him the first black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor in 1963, for his indelible performance in Lilies of the Field.

That same year, he became a powerful voice in the civil rights movement, where he stood alongside Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster in MLK’s March on Washington. Later, Poitier dedicated his life to humanitarian work and diplomacy as Bahamian Ambassador to Japan and UNESCO. 

‘He was to Hollywood as Jackie Robinson was to baseball,’ said Reverend Al Sharpton to MSNCB. ‘This world and certainly the world of cinema could never repay the debt that is owned to Sidney Poitier.’ 

Poitier is survived by his wife, Joanna Shimkus, five daughters, eight grand children and a handful of great-grandchildren. He is preceded in death by his daughter, Gina, who died in 2018. 

Born on February 20, 1927, Poitier’s life began humbly as the youngest of seven children who were raised on a farm on Cat Island in the Bahamas, an impoverished narrow strip of land with no plumbing or electricity. His parents were tomato farmers who often traveled to Miami, Florida to sell their product.

It was during one of these trips that Poitier was born two months premature. He was not expected to live. When his mother consulted a palm reader, her fears were assuaged. ‘The lady took her hand and started speaking to my mother, ‘Don’t worry about your son. He will survive,” said Poitier in an interview with CBS News in 2013. ‘And these were her words; she said, ‘He will walk with kings.” 

Poitier only had two years of formal schooling, but he became fascinated with movies when he was 11 years old. He dropped out of school at age 13 to help his family with finances by working as a water boy for ditch diggers and warehouse laborer.

Two years later in 1943, Poitier’s father sent him to live with his older brother in Miami after he was jailed overnight with some friends for stealing corn. His father took him to the shipping dock and put $3 in his hand.

‘He said, ‘Take care of yourself, son.’ And he turned me around to face the boat,’ recalled Poitier in a 2009 interview with NPR.

In Miami, while working as delivery boy and car valet, Poitier encountered institutionalized racism for the first time. Escaping the South, he headed to New York City alone, at age 16, to try his hand at acting. 

With no money, he slept in bus terminals, lavatory booths, and on the rooftop of the Brill Building. He worked a series of odd jobs – as a porter, busboy and chicken plucker – before landing a fortuitous job as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He moved into a $5-a-week room in Harlem.

With only two years of schooling, Poitier couldn’t read the scripts. An elderly Jewish waiter at the restaurant took the struggling teenager under his wing and spent countless hours teaching him how to read with the newspaper, improving his comprehension, grammar and punctuation.

‘That man, every night, the place is closed, everyone’s gone, and he sat there with me week after week after week,’ Poitier told CBS News. ‘And he told me about punctuations. He told me where dots were and what the dots mean here between these two words, all of that stuff.’

In 1944, Poitier lied about his age and did a short stint in the US Army where he was assigned to work at a veterans hospital in upstate New York. Disillusioned by the mistreatment of soldiers, he returned to Harlem after his discharge and responded to a wanted ad for the American Negro Theater. 

Marred by his thick Bahamian accent, Poitier’s audition tanked, but was determined to perfect his English by listening to the radio for hours – mimicking their pronunciations and rhythm of speech. He convinced the group to hire him as a janitor in exchange for acting classes. Soon after, Poitier was working as an understudy for fellow classmate, Harry Belafonte.   

Poitier began to make headway on Broadway with a few minor roles in Lysistrata and Anna Lucasta, but his first big break came in 1950 when writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz offered him $750 a week to play a the lead part in the influential film, No Way Out. It was the first major film to feature a black actor in a stereotype-shattering role as an intelligent young doctor who is faced with a racist patient. 

His performance was so powerful, the film was credited with ending British colonial rule in the Bahamas.

In 1950, Poitier married model and dancer, Juanita Hardy. ‘I had faith in myself and faith in the future — enough of each to marry a beautiful young girl,’ he said in his memoir. The first of their four daughters, Beverly, was born two years later, followed by Pamela, Sherri and Gina. 

Sidney was still working at a BBQ joint to made ends meet and subsidize his acting career, ‘Times were so tough that I used to take milk from the restaurant home for my kid,’ he recalled. 

After distinguishing his acting chops in No Way Out, Poitier played increasingly prominent roles as a reverend in the apartheid drama Cry the Beloved Country (1952), a troubled inner city student in Blackboard Jungle (1955), and an escaped convict opposite Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones (1958), which made him the first black man to be nominated for an Oscar.  

Pretty soon, Sidney Poitier was a bonafide matinee idol and he understood ‘the enormous responsibility’ of his newfound fame. ‘Blacks were so new in Hollywood. There was almost no frame of reference for us except as stereotypical, one-dimensional characters, said Poitier to Oprah Winfrey. ‘I had in mind what was expected of me — not just what other blacks expected but what my mother and father expected. And what I expected of myself.’

Then came Lilies of the Field, which finally won him an Oscar for his portrayal of Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who helps nuns build a church in the Arizona desert.  

Inspired by his more outspoken former classmate, Harry Belafonte, Poitier embraced the civil rights movement. He attended the March on Washington alongside Belafonte and Charlton Heston in 1963. and was followed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 when traveled to Mississippi after the infamous murders of three young civil rights workers. 

By 1967, Poitier was commanding $1million a movie as a box office draw with three back to back hits: To Sir With Love, Guess Whose Coming For Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. 

He changed film history in 1969 with his portrayal of a big city detective in the racially charged crime drama, They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! In one iconic scene, Detective Tibbs is slapped in the face by a racist plantation owner before Tibbs retaliates by slapping him back. 

Originally the script had called for Tibbs to turn around and leave; but Poitier agreed to do the film only on the condition that the scene was changed to add his retaliation. ‘That kind of a scene, which would be electrifying on the screen, was always either avoided, not thought of,’ he told WHYY radio station. ‘And I insisted that if they wished my participation in the film, that they would have to re-write it to exemplify that.’ 

‘And of course it is one of those great, great moments in all of film, when you slap him back,’ said CBS News’ Lesley Stahl. He replied, ‘Yes, I knew that I would have been insulting every black person in the world  if I hadn’t.’ 

Despite his efforts to break barriers and support racial equality, Poitier was still criticized by more militant blacks who called him ‘a showcase Negro’ and ‘the white man’s black man.’

‘I can tell you what I think the flak was about,’ he told the Washington Post in 1995. ‘For a long time, I got all the jobs — one picture after another, after another. And the roles I played were very unlike the average black person in America at the time.’

‘Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life,’ he told Oprah Winfrey. ‘There are those who allow their lives to be defined only by race. I correct anyone who comes at me only in terms of race.’

Poitier’s marriage to Juanita Hardy was over by 1965. He had began a clandestine affair with fellow Tinseltown legend, Diahann Carroll, during the filming of Porgy and Bess in 1959. Carroll had been the first black woman to star in a TV show in a non-servant role. 

‘As I got to know her, I realized she was one of the brightest women I had ever known,’ said Poitier. He was struck by her ‘amazing cheekbones, mysterious eyes, and perfect teeth.’ 

The tempestuous romance lasted nine years, and ended tumultuously in 1968, when he allegedly requested to live without her daughter for six months, so he ‘wouldn’t be jumping from one marriage straight into another.’ 

Poitier moved from actor to director in 1972 with a  deal to star and produce two movies for Columbia Pictures. He teamed up with old pal Harry Belafonte to make the post-Civil War tale, Buck and the Preacher. 

In all, he would direct nine films that ran the gamut on topics from interracial tension to slapstick comedies that starred Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor. 

Poitier continued to appear onscreen sporadically throughout the 1990s, most famously when he played Nelson Mandela for Showtime in 1997. 

That same year, he was appointed ambassador of the Bahamas to Japan, a position that he held until 2007. He also concurrently served as the ambassador of the Bahamas to UNESCO.  

Poitier’s success inspired legions of black actors over the years, including Halle Berry, Denzil Washington and Danny Glover, who once told Poitier, ‘You have made it possible for me to dream bigger dreams.’

His prolific career would earn him a trove of awards including: an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Presidential Medal of Freedom, BAFTA fellowship for lifetime achievement, Golden Globe Cecil B DeMille Award and the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement trophy.

Poitier humbly accepted a lifetime achievement Oscar at the Academy Awards in 2002: ‘I accept this award in memory of all the African American actors who went before me in the difficult years and on whose shoulders I was privileged to stand to see where I might go.’

He reflected on the ‘courageous, unselfish choices made by a handful of visionary American filmmakers, directors, writers and producers’ that shaped his career. ‘They knew the odds that stood against them, and their efforts were overwhelming and likely could have proved too high to overcome.’

‘Still those filmmakers persevered, speaking through their art to the best in all of us. And I’ve benefited from their effort. The industry benefited from their effort. America benefited from their effort.’