Sidney Poitier Wins Oscar: Breaking Hollywood's Color Barrier

Sidney Poitier walked to the stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 13, 1964, and collected an Oscar that Hollywood had never given a Black man. His Best Actor award for Lilies of the Field, in which he played an itinerant handyman who builds a chapel for a group of German nuns, broke a barrier that the American film industry had maintained since the Academy Awards began in 1929. Anne Bancroft presented the statue, and the standing ovation from the audience was long enough to feel like an apology. Poitier's path to that stage had been anything but guaranteed. Born in Miami to Bahamian tomato farmers, he grew up on Cat Island in the Bahamas without electricity or running water. He arrived in New York at age 15 with $1.50 in his pocket, sleeping on rooftops and washing dishes for a living. When he auditioned for the American Negro Theatre, the director told him to stop wasting everyone's time and go get a job as a dishwasher. Poitier spent months working on his thick Bahamian accent and studying acting by listening to radio programs. His victory came during the most intense year of the civil rights movement. Three months earlier, the 24th Amendment had abolished poll taxes. Three months later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be signed into law. Freedom Summer voter registration drives were being organized in Mississippi. Poitier's win existed in this charged atmosphere, simultaneously a genuine artistic achievement and an inescapable political statement about whose talent America was willing to recognize. Poitier followed the Oscar with a remarkable string of films: A Patch of Blue, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, all released in 1967, when he became the top box-office draw in America. He carried the weight of representing an entire race on screen with extraordinary grace, though he later expressed frustration at being limited to roles that made white audiences comfortable. No other Black actor won the Best Actor Oscar until Denzel Washington in 2002, a gap of 38 years.