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August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
How Sidney Poitier Changed America
This week's guest, Mr. Sidney Poitier, is a man who has made enormous contributions to the advancement of African Americans in his long and distinguished career. When talking about actors, especially black actors, it's hard to name anyone who has even come close to the number of groundbreaking films Poitier has made. Always dignified, always eloquent, always impeccable in manners, bearing and speech, his characters were some of the first to show black people in film as more than servants or savages or thugs.
In movies like In the Heat of the Night and A Raisin in the Sun, he is no less than electric on screen in his portrayal of young black Americans fighting against the tremendous forces of racism and conservatism that sought to keep African Americans oppressed. In his 1967 role as Dr. John Wade Prentice in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, he encapsulates what he represented to a generation of Americans, and still does: hope—for change, for enlightenment, for a better world for his children. The film gives us cause to consider exactly how far we've come in the last forty years, from a time where the idea of a mixed-race child becoming president was almost preposterous, to now, when there's a very good chance that's who our next president will be.
This scene from the film, in which Poitier and Spencer Tracy discuss the young doctor's plans, is dated, if only by the frankness with which issues of race are discussed. But it is a proud reminder of just what Poitier, and those he inspired, have accomplished.