Sidney Poitier and The Measure of a Man

I have been reading Sidney Poitier’s book, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Memoir (HarperCollins, 2000). It was my admiration for Sidney Poitier as an actor and a man that made me take a second look at the book in the store. It was that subtitle, A Spiritual Memoir, that made me buy it.

I have never seen a movie with Sidney Poitier in it that I didn’t like. The Defiant Ones, Porgy and Bess, A Raisin in the Sun, Lilies of the Field, A Patch of Blue, To Sir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner….

All of these films appeared during what might be called my formative years and they all informed, in some way, the viewpoint I was developing about race and the color of one’s skin. I was a white girl who had very little contact with people of other races but I was aware that there was an undercurrent of racial tension in the country.

When I was four years old we were living outside Bonner Springs, Kansas – not so very far from Topeka where, in 1954, Brown vs. the Board of Education was being played out.

A couple of years later, my mother drove me back and forth to Lawrence for speech therapy so that I could learn to say “Sammy Snake” instead of “Thammy Thnake”. There was a little black boy in my speech therapy class. I remember later hearing my mother tell someone else that she hadn’t been at all sure how I would “handle” being in a class with a black child. I was surprised. To me, it didn’t make a bit of difference – except that his smile was much more impressive than mine.

But such innocence could not last long. Racial tension was like a headache that never quite goes away. You don’t like it, you try not to worry about it, but you know it is there. And there were times when it ached so bad that you just wanted to cover your head and pray for it to end.

In 1955, a tired woman sat in the first available seat on the bus and was arrested! For being tired? No, for being black.

In 1957, while I was walking to my one-room rural school, nine children had to be escorted to class at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas by the National Guard. Because they were black.

In 1961, “freedom riders” were traveling through the South and were attacked by angry mobs – because they were black or “black sympathizers”.

By this time I counted myself as a “black sympathizer” though I didn’t personally know a single black person except the little boy back in Speech Therapy and I hadn’t seen him since I was six years old. I just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. As far as I was conce
ed, the very necessity for a civil rights movement reflected poorly on the whites of our country.

In 1963, our black-and-white TV carried shocking images of brutality in Birmingham, Alabama as fire hoses and dogs are unleashed on civil rights protesters. Medgars Evers was murdered outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. 200,000 people marched on Washington and thrilled to Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. Four little girls were killed when their church was bombed in Birmingham.

And Lilies of the Field came out. I was thirteen. The movie had a profound effect on me. In all of the hatred and insanity of one of the most shameful periods of our national history, here was a simple story about people working beyond prejudice. Here was a man who took time out of his own conce
s to help a group of German nuns help a bunch of poor Hispanics. Here was a taste, a teaser, of what our country could be like.

I loved that movie and I loved Sydney Poitier. He became, for me, a model of what a man could be – not a black man, not a white man, not a pink man with purple polka-dots – decent, honorable even in spite of himself.

In 1964, three civil rights workers – two white and one black – were arrested on trumped up charges because they had been working to register black voters. They were jailed for several hours and then, under cover of darkness, released into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered them.

In 1966, I did a term paper on the Black Panthers founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

In 1967, in an aptly named case (Loving vs Virginia) the Supreme Court ruled that state laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage where unconstitutional. There were major civil rights riots in Newark, New Jersey and Detroit, Michigan. There was so much anger, so much hatred, so much fear.

And To Sir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner all came out to wide acclaim and it seemed that it might just be possible for us all to get along.

Then in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white man.

There have been many times in my life when I’ve been ashamed to be white and have wished that I – and everyone else – could be more like Sidney Poitier.