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      Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

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      Premiering in September, the films take very different looks at what has and hasn’t changed in the almost 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education.You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.Black and white students rode the bus together as Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston were bused to mostly white enclaves of South Boston.Associated PressSome of the ramifications and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long buildup to and catastrophic results of busing in Boston, by which students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were willing to defends ethnic neighborhood borders. It premieres on Sept. 11.“The Harvest,” produced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to matriculate from first grade to high school. It premieres on Sept. 12.The films arrive at a time when many of the hard-fought gains of desegregation have been reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the U.S. Department of Education, are more segregated than they were before courts intervened. Both underscore what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the almost 70 years since Brown while also questioning tidy presumptions.“These two stories are in conversation with each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they’re almost counterintuitive, because we are all accustomed to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and in the North communities were much more open and progressive. By putting the films together, it just challenges your assumptions in a really interesting way.”Both films also grapple with an unavoidable question: Why has the process been so difficult?Today, when segregation is rife in even some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons aren’t always plain or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often pretty overt. A lot of white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their Black peers. And a lot of politicians were happy to help them make it so.When many people think about segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think about the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows just how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston schools segregated, particularly in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.Many teens and parents hurled bricks, bottles, rocks and racist insults at the buses bringing Black students to South Boston High School in 1974. Donald Preston/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThese were self-enclosed neighborhoods that didn’t cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools by way of the ballot box, direct action and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then the head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and riled up public support for the status quo.“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown right out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nobody was progressive anymore.”Grimberg, on the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important Northern civil rights story. We’ve heard lots of Southern stories, but this is a story of a very long, protracted struggle for educational rights for Black kids in the North.”By 1974, when the Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. mandated the integration of Boston schools by busing, the tension had long been building. Images captured from the first days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents hurled bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.One of the most potent and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photo by Stanley Forman, shot during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters while another moves to assault him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life on that day.“The Harvest,” too, features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts stepping in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.As seen in “The Harvest”: Striking sharecroppers camped out in Washington, across from the White House, in 1966 after being kicked off their land near Leland, Miss.Scherman Rowland/UMass AmherstThe integration of Leland public schools wasn’t always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what was happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process was indeed a stroll down the street.Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate through the town’s public schools. (He did his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that generally didn’t carry over after the final bell rang — when, for instance, he wanted to play G.I. Joe dolls with his Black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged it.What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools popping up after the 1969 Supreme Court decision were organized largely by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants to exclude Black teachers and students. Beneath the placid surface, Leland’s schools were resegregating.“There really was this overt plan to create a whole new system of schools, and to try to extract, if possible, all white kids from the public schools and then to actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland was different in that it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that did happen in some other places in the South, and that we certainly saw in Boston.”Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, worked together previously on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won a Pulitzer. It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.“It was valuable to have the two of us on this project,” Readdean, who is Black, said. “Sometimes, especially because the subject’s so raw for the people that lived through it, some of the whites maybe were more forthcoming talking to Sharon than they would have been with me. We wanted interviews with truthful recollection, not something where they’re trying to be all P.C.The Leland High School basketball team, as seen in the 1979 yearbook. The journalist Douglas A. Blackmon is at the far left in the back row.Leland School District“I felt the same way when we were talking with the Black participants, that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal talking to me.”Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: The schools of Boston and Leland have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and came back to fill key municipal positions.One, Jessie King, is now the school district’s superintendent, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are on the upswing. Another, Billy Barber, is police chief.They are the better part of the harvest that gives the film its title, residents who seized new opportunities and then gave back to the community where they were raised. They’re a reminder that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools have faded.“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so that they can become productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. It doesn’t just happen.” More

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      Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist

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      In the 1950s, when segregation was still widespread, his ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. But his primary focus was civil rights.Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.Performing at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in 1956.Al Lambert/Associated PressMr. Belafonte was equally successful as a concert attraction: Handsome and charismatic, he held audiences spellbound with dramatic interpretations of a repertoire that encompassed folk traditions from all over the world — rollicking calypsos like “Matilda,” work songs like “Lead Man Holler,” tender ballads like “Scarlet Ribbons.” By 1959 he was the most highly paid Black performer in history, with fat contracts for appearances in Las Vegas, at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and at the Palace in New York.Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Mr. Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though, and it was his friendly rival Sidney Poitier, not Mr. Belafonte, who became the first bona fide Black matinee idol.But making movies was never Mr. Belafonte’s priority, and after a while neither was making music. He continued to perform into the 21st century, and to appear in movies as well (although he had two long hiatuses from the screen), but his primary focus from the late 1950s on was civil rights.Early in his career, Mr. Belafonte befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter. Dr. King and Mr. Belafonte at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1956.via Harry BelafonteEarly in his career, he befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter of Dr. King and the quest for racial equality he personified. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for that organization and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.He provided money to bail Dr. King and other civil rights activists out of jail. He took part in the March on Washington in 1963. His spacious apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan became Dr. King’s home away from home. And he quietly maintained an insurance policy on Dr. King’s life, with the King family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure that the family was taken care of after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.(Nonetheless, in 2013 he sued Dr. King’s three surviving children in a dispute over documents that Mr. Belafonte said were his property and that the children said belonged to the King estate. The suit was settled the next year, with Mr. Belafonte retaining possession.)In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after Dr. King’s death, Mr. Belafonte expressed ambivalence about his high profile in the civil rights movement. He would like to “be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people,” he said, adding, “I hate marching, and getting called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats out of jail.” But, he said, he accepted his role.The Challenge of RacismIn the same interview, he noted ruefully that although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. As frustrating as that may have been, he was much more upset by the racism that he confronted even at the height of his fame.His role in the 1957 movie “Island in the Sun,” which contained the suggestion of a romance between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, generated outrage in the South; a bill was even introduced in the South Carolina Legislature that would have fined any theater showing the film. In Atlanta for a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1962, Mr. Belafonte was twice refused service in the same restaurant. Television appearances with white female singers — Petula Clark in 1968, Julie Andrews in 1969 — angered many viewers and, in the case of Ms. Clark, threatened to cost him a sponsor.He sometimes drew criticism from Black people, including the suggestion early in his career that he owed his success to the lightness of his skin (his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were white). When he divorced his wife in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, who had been the only white member of Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe, The Amsterdam News wrote, “Many Negroes are wondering why a man who has waved the flag of justice for his race should turn from a Negro wife to a white wife.”Mr. Belafonte with Ed Sullivan in 1955. At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic.Associated PressWhen RCA Victor, his record company, promoted him as the “King of Calypso,” Mr. Belafonte was denounced as a pretender in Trinidad, the acknowledged birthplace of that highly rhythmic music, where an annual competition is held to choose a calypso king.He himself never claimed to be a purist when it came to calypso or any of the other traditional styles he embraced, let alone the king of calypso. He and his songwriting collaborators loved folk music, he said, but saw nothing wrong with shaping it to their own ends.“Purism is the best cover-up for mediocrity,” he told The New York Times in 1959. “If there is no change we might just as well go back to the first ‘ugh,’ which must have been the first song.”Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born on March 1, 1927, in Harlem. His father, who was born in Martinique (and later changed the family name), worked occasionally as a chef on merchant ships and was often away; his mother, Melvine (Love) Bellanfanti, born in Jamaica, was a domestic.In 1936, Harry, his mother and his younger brother, Dennis, moved to Jamaica. Unable to find work there, his mother soon returned to New York, leaving him and his brother to be looked after by relatives who, he later recalled, were either “unemployed or above the law.” They rejoined her in Harlem in 1940.Awakening to Black HistoryMr. Belafonte dropped out of George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy, where he was assigned to load munitions aboard ships. Black shipmates introduced him to the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and other African American authors and urged him to study Black history.He received further encouragement from Marguerite Byrd, the daughter of a middle-class Washington family, whom he met while he was stationed in Virginia and she was studying psychology at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). They married in 1948.He and Ms. Byrd had two children, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte, who survive him, as do his two children by Ms. Robinson, Gina Belafonte and David; and eight grandchildren. He and Ms. Robinson divorced in 2004, and he married Pamela Frank, a photographer, in 2008, and she survives him, too, along with a stepdaughter, Sarah Frank; a stepson, Lindsey Frank; and three step-grandchildren.Mr. Belafonte and his wife, Julie Robinson, during a civil rights event — the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom — at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1957.George Tames/The New York TimesBack in New York after his discharge, Mr. Belafonte became interested in acting and enrolled under the G.I. Bill at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. He first took the stage at the American Negro Theater in Manhattan, where he worked as a stagehand and where he began his lifelong friendship with a fellow theatrical novice, Sidney Poitier.Finding anything other than what he called “Uncle Tom” roles proved difficult, and even though singing was little more than a hobby, it was as a singer and not an actor that Mr. Belafonte found an audience.Early in 1949, he was given the chance to perform during intermissions for two weeks at the Royal Roost, a popular Midtown jazz nightclub. He was an immediate hit, and the two weeks became five months.Finding Folk MusicAfter enjoying some success but little creative satisfaction as a jazz-oriented pop singer, Mr. Belafonte looked elsewhere for inspiration. With the guitarist Millard Thomas, who would become his accompanist, and the playwright and novelist William Attaway, who would collaborate on many of his songs, he immersed himself in the study of folk music. (The calypso singer and songwriter Irving Burgie later supplied much of his repertoire, including “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell.”)His manager, Jack Rollins, helped him develop an act that emphasized his acting ability and his striking good looks as much as a voice that was husky and expressive but, as Mr. Belafonte admitted, not very powerful.A triumphant 1951 engagement at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village led to an even more successful one at the Blue Angel, the Vanguard’s upscale sister room on the Upper East Side. That in turn led to a recording contract with RCA and a role on Broadway in the 1953 revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.”Dorothy Dandridge and Mr. Belafonte in a scene from the 1954 film “Carmen Jones.”20th Century FoxPerforming a repertoire that included the calypso standard “Hold ’em Joe” and his arrangement of the folk song “Mark Twain,” Mr. Belafonte won enthusiastic reviews, television bookings and a Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical. He also caught the eye of the Hollywood producer and director Otto Preminger, who cast him in the 1954 movie version of “Carmen Jones,” an all-Black update of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, which had been a hit on Broadway a decade earlier.Mr. Belafonte’s co-star was Dorothy Dandridge, with whom he had also appeared the year before in his first movie, the little-seen low-budget drama “Bright Road.” Although they were both accomplished vocalists, their singing voices in “Carmen Jones” were dubbed by opera singers.Mr. Belafonte also made news for a movie he turned down, citing what he called its negative racial stereotypes: the 1959 screen version of “Porgy and Bess,” also a Preminger film. The role of Porgy was offered instead to his old friend Mr. Poitier, whom he criticized publicly for accepting it.Stepping Away From FilmIn the 1960s, as Mr. Poitier became a major box-office attraction, Mr. Belafonte made no movies at all: Hollywood, he said, was not interested in the socially conscious films he wanted to make, and he was not interested in the roles he was offered. He did, however, become a familiar presence — and an occasional source of controversy — on television.His special “Tonight With Belafonte” won an Emmy in 1960 (a first for a Black performer), but a deal to do five more specials for that show’s sponsor, the cosmetics company Revlon, fell apart after one more was broadcast; according to Mr. Belafonte, Revlon asked him not to feature Black and white performers together. The taping of a 1968 special with Petula Clark was interrupted when Ms. Clark touched Mr. Belafonte’s arm, and a representative of the sponsor, Chrysler-Plymouth, demanded a retake. (The producer refused, and the sponsor’s representative later apologized, although Mr. Belafonte said the apology came “one hundred years too late.”)Jacob Harris/Associated PressWhen Mr. Belafonte returned to film as both producer and co-star, with Zero Mostel, of “The Angel Levine” (1970), based on a story by Bernard Malamud, the project had a sociopolitical edge: His Harry Belafonte Enterprises, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to learn filmmaking by working on the crew. One of them, Drake Walker, wrote the story for Mr. Belafonte’s next movie, “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), a gritty western that also starred Mr. Poitier.But after appearing as a mob boss (a parody of Marlon Brando’s character in “The Godfather”) with Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby in the hit 1974 comedy “Uptown Saturday Night” — directed, as “Buck and the Preacher” had been, by Mr. Poitier — Mr. Belafonte was once again absent from the big screen, this time until 1992, when he played himself in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire “The Player.”He appeared onscreen only sporadically after that, most notably as a gangster in Mr. Altman’s “Kansas City” (1996), for which Mr. Belafonte won a New York Film Critics Circle Award. His final film role was in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” in 2018.Political ActivismMr. Belafonte continued to give concerts in the years when he was off the screen, but he concentrated on political activism and charitable work. In the 1980s, he helped organize a cultural boycott of South Africa as well as the Live Aid concert and the all-star recording “We Are the World,” both of which raised money to fight famine in Africa. In 1986, encouraged by some New York State Democratic Party leaders, he briefly considered running for the United States Senate. In 1987, he replaced Danny Kaye as UNICEF’s good-will ambassador.Never shy about expressing his opinion, he became increasingly outspoken during the George W. Bush administration. In 2002, he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master.” Four years later he called Mr. Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.”Harry Belafonte demonstrated against nuclear weapons in Bonn, Germany, in 1981.Klaus Rose/Picture-alliance, DPA, via Associated Press ImagesMr. Belafonte was equally outspoken in the 2013 New York mayoral election, in which he campaigned for the Democratic candidate and eventual winner, Bill de Blasio. During the campaign he referred to the Koch brothers, the wealthy industrialists known for their support of conservative causes, as “white supremacists” and compared them to the Ku Klux Klan. (Mr. de Blasio quickly distanced himself from that comment.)Such statements made Mr. Belafonte a frequent target of criticism, but no one disputed his artistry. Among the many honors he received in his later years were a Kennedy Center Honor in 1989, the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2000.In 2011, he was the subject of a documentary film, “Sing Your Song,” and published his autobiography, “My Song.”In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in recognition of his lifelong fight for civil rights and other causes. The honor, he told The Times, gave him “a strong sense of reward.”He remained politically active to the end. On Election Day 2016, The Times published an opinion article by Mr. Belafonte urging people not to vote for Donald J. Trump, whom he called “feckless and immature.”“Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose,” he wrote, referring to African American voters, “and we must answer: Only the dream, only everything.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFour years later, he returned to the opinion pages with a similar message: “We have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Richard Severo and Alex Traub contributed reporting. 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      Harry Belafonte, Folk Hero

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      Cool and charismatic, Belafonte channeled his stardom into activism. He was a true people person, who knew how to reach, teach and challenge us.Of the many (many) job titles you could lay on Harry Belafonte — singer, actor, entertainer, talk show host, activist — the one that nails what he’s come to mean is folk hero.Not a title one puts on a business card or lists in, say, a Twitter bio. “Folk hero” is a description that accrues — over time, out of significance. You’re out doing those other jobs when, suddenly, what you’re doing matters — to people, to your people, to your country.Belafonte was a folk hero that way. Not the most dynamic or distinctive actor or singer or dancer you’ll ever come across. Yet the cool, frank, charismatic, seemingly indefatigable cat who died on Tuesday, at 96, had something else, something as crucial. He was, in his way, a people person. He understood how to reach, teach and challenge them, how to keep them honest, how to dedicate his fame to a politics of accountability, more tenaciously than any star of the civil rights era or in its wake. The forum for this sort of moral transformation probably should have been the movies. But the Hollywood of that era would tolerate a single Black person and, ultimately, it chose Sidney Poitier, Belafonte’s soul mate, sometime suitemate and fellow Caribbean American. Belafonte did make a handful of movies at the beginning of his career. “Odds Against Tomorrow,” a naturalist film noir from 1959, is the meatiest of them — and his last picture for more than a decade, too. Poitier became the movie star, during a dire stretch for this country. Belafonte became the folk hero.“Tonight With Belafonte,” a 1959 show that aired on CBS, featured work songs, gospel and moaning blues performed on spare sets.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesIt began, of course, with the songs, actual folk music. Well, with Belafonte’s interpolation, which in its varied guises wed acoustic singing with Black spiritual arrangements and the sounds of the islands. He took his best-selling music on the road, to white audiences who’d pay a lot of money to watch him perform from his million-selling album “Calypso,” the one with “Day-O.” A major part of his knowing people was knowing that they watched TV. And rather than simply translate his hot-ticket cabaret act for American living rooms, Belafonte imagined something stranger and more alluring. In 1959, he somehow got CBS to broadcast “Tonight With Belafonte,” an hourlong studio performance that starts with a live commercial for Revlon (the night’s sponsor) and melts from the gleaming blond actor Barbara Britton (the ad’s pitchperson) into the sight of Black men amid shadows and great big chains.They’re pantomiming hard labor while Belafonte belts a viscous version of “Bald Headed Woman.” The whole hour is just this sort of chilling: percussive work songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, dramatically spare sets that imply segregation and incarceration, the weather system that called herself Odetta. Belafonte never makes a direct speech about injustice. He trusts the songs and stagecraft to speak for themselves. Folks — Black folks, especially — will get it. It’s their music.“The bleaker my acting prospects looked,” Belafonte wrote, in “My Song,” his memoir from 2011, “the more I threw myself into political organizing.” That organizing took familiar forms — marches, protests, rallies. Money. He helped underwrite the civil rights movement, paying for freedom rides. He maintained a life insurance policy on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary, because Dr. King didn’t believe he could afford it. The building he bought at 300 West End Avenue in Manhattan and converted into a 21-room palace seemed to double as the movement’s New York headquarters. (“Martin began drafting his antiwar speech in my apartment.”) So, yes, Belafonte was near the psychic core and administrative center of the movement.But those bleak Hollywood prospects — some incalculable combination of racism and too-raw talent — kept Belafonte uniquely earthbound, doing a kind of cultural organizing. It wasn’t the movies that have kept him in so many people’s lives these many decades, though he never stopped acting altogether, best of all in a handful of Robert Altman films, particularly “Kansas City,” from 1996, in which he does some persuasive intimidation as an icy 1930s gangster named Seldom Seen. His organizing happened on TV, where he was prominently featured throughout the 1960s, as himself, and where his political reach was arguably as penetrating as his soul mate’s, on variety shows he produced that introduced America to Gloria Lynne and Odetta and John Lewis.There was also that week in February 1968 when Johnny Carson handed his “Tonight Show” over to Belafonte. The national mood had sunk into infernal tumult driven by the Vietnam War and exasperation with racist neglect, for starters. (It was going to be a grim election year, too.) Whether a Black substitute host of a popular talk show was an antidote for malaise or a provocative reflection of it, Belafonte went beyond the chummy ribbing that was Carson’s forte. He was probing. His guests that week included Poitier, Lena Horne, Bill Cosby, Paul Newman, Wilt Chamberlain, the Smothers Brothers, Zero Mostel and, months before they were murdered, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King. Belafonte turned the famous into folks, mixing the frippery of the format with the gravitas of the moment.Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was among the interviewees when Belafonte guest hosted Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” for a week in February 1968.Associated PressPaul Robeson preceded Belafonte in an activism partly born of artistic frustration. Robeson’s pursuit of racial equality, for everybody, won him persecution and immiseration and derailed his career. He personally warned Belafonte and Poitier of the damaging toll this country will take on Black artists who believe their art and celebrity ought do more than dazzle and distract. Belafonte watched the American government drag Robeson through hell and decided to help drag white America to moral betterment in any arena that would have him, somewhat out of respect for his elder. (“My whole life was an homage to him,” Belafonte once wrote about Robeson.) Those arenas included everything from “Free to Be … You and Me” and “The Muppet Show” to Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and, on several indelible occasions, “Sesame Street.”With some artists, a legacy is a tricky reduction. What did it all come down to? And it just can’t be that the immense career of Harry Belafonte — with its milestones and breakthroughs, with its risks and hazards, with its triumphs and disappointments, with its doubling as a living archive of the latter half of a 20th-century America that he fought to ennoble — can be summed up by the time he spent talking to the Count.But that, too, is how a people person reaches people. That’s how Harry Belafonte reached a lot of us: little kids who were curious and naturally open to the wonders of the human experience. So it makes sense that the sight of this elegant man, reclined among inquisitive children and surly felt critters, speaking with wisdom in that scratched timbre of his about, say, what an animal is (and, by extension, who an animal is not), told us who we were. People, yes, but perhaps another generation of folks with this hero in common, learning through the osmosis of good television how to live their lives in homage to him. More

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      Harry Belafonte on His Artistic Values and His Activism

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      In interviews and articles in The New York Times, Mr. Belafonte, who died on Tuesday, spoke about the civil rights movement and his frustration with how Black life was depicted onscreen.Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.A child of Harlem, Mr. Belafonte used his platform at the height of the entertainment world to speak out frequently on his music, how Black life was depicted onscreen and, most important to him, the civil rights movement. Here are some of the insights Mr. Belafonte provided to The New York Times during his many decades in the public spotlight, as they appeared at the time:His musicMr. Belafonte’s string of hits, including “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” helped create an American obsession with Caribbean music that led his record company to promote him as the “King of Calypso.”But Mr. Belafonte never embraced that sort of monarchical title, rejecting “purism” as a “cover-up for mediocrity” and explaining that he saw his work as a mash-up of musical styles.He told The New York Times Magazine in 1959 that folk music had “hidden within it a great dramatic sense, and a powerful lyrical sense.” He also plainly conceded: “I don’t have a great voice.”In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some insights into what may be going on globally, from what I’ve experienced.”He said that “Day-O,” for instance, was a way of life.“It’s a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said. “It’s a classic work song.”His views on film and televisionMr. Belafonte’s success in music helped him become a Hollywood leading man. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier landed more substantive and nuanced roles than Black actors had previously received.Nonetheless, Mr. Belafonte was left largely unsatisfied.Writing for The Times in 1968, he complained that “the real beauty, the soul, the integrity of the black community is rarely reflected” on television.“The medium is dominated by white-supremacy concepts and racist attitudes,” he wrote. “TV excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither networks nor sponsors want that.”Mr. Belafonte emphasized that his 10-year-old son saw few Black heroes on television.“The nobility in his heritage and the values that could complement his positive growth and sense of manhood are denied him,” he wrote. “Instead, there is everything to tear him down and give him an inferiority complex. He will see the Negro only as a rioter and a social problem, never as a whole human being.”Roughly 25 years later, Mr. Belafonte was circumspect, suggesting in an interview with The Times that little had changed.“Even today, on the big screen, the pictures that are always successful are pictures where blacks appear in the way white America buys it,” he said in 1993. “And we’re told that what we really want to express is not profitable and is not commercially viable.”His politics and activismEven as Mr. Belafonte was in the prime of his entertainment career, he was intently focused on activism and civil rights.“Back in 1959,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in 1981, “I fully believed in the civil-rights movement. I had a personal commitment to it, and I had my personal breakthroughs — I produced the first black TV special; I was the first black to perform at the Waldorf Astoria. I felt if we could just turn the nation around, things would fall into place.”But Mr. Belafonte lamented that by the middle of the 1970s, the movement had ended.“When the doors of Hollywood shut on minorities and blacks at the end of the 70’s,” he said, “a lot of black artists had been enjoying the exploitation for 10 years. But one day they found the shop had closed down.”Mr. Belafonte remained outspoken about politics in his later years. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master”; he called President George W. Bush a “terrorist” in 2006, and lamented in 2012 that modern celebrities had “turned their back on social responsibility.”“There’s no evidence that artists are of the same passion and of the same kind of commitment of the artists of my time,” he told The Times in 2016. “The absence of black artists is felt very strongly because the most visible oppression is in the black community.”In 2016 and again in 2020, he visited the opinion pages of The Times to urge voters to reject Donald J. Trump.“The vote is perhaps the single most important weapon in our arsenal,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in the 2016 article. “The same things needed now are the same things needed before,” he added. “Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die. ” More

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      ‘Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power’ Review: A Movement That Changed America

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      With arresting interviews and archival footage, this documentary looks back at a 1960s voting-rights campaign in Alabama that gave rise to a national movement for Black power.“Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power” opens with interviews with men and women who grew up in the titular Alabama county in the 1960s. The Black interviewees, children of sharecroppers, recall an atmosphere of poverty, racism and bloody violence; their white counterparts, members of landowning families, remember a “peaceful, almost idyllic place.”These discrepant versions of life in Lowndes set the stage for Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary, which retraces the story of how one of the most inequitable, fiercely segregated counties in America gave rise to a national movement for Black power. In 1965, Lowndes had no registered Black voters, despite its population being 80 percent Black. The directors follow the ripples of change that started when a local man, John Hulett, began organizing Black voters, culminating in the founding of a new party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, with an influential symbol: the black panther.The film teases out one of the many microhistories in the Civil Rights movement. Notably, Lowndes did not see the sustained involvement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; instead, its grass-roots struggle drew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led by Stokely Carmichael, which took a more local — and more radical — approach.Yet the power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.” The archival footage, too, mixes protest images and quotidian scenes, illustrating the simple acts of community that underlie any political movement.Lowndes County and the Road to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Picture Taker’ Review: Civil Rights Photographer and F.B.I. Informant

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      The documentary, by the director of “Who Killed Malcolm X?,” is a compelling biography of Ernest Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle Black history.After the photojournalist Ernest Withers died in 2007, a bombshell investigation revealed that the respected Memphis photographer, known for taking over a million pictures of 20th-century Black life during his career, had also been a paid informant of the F.B.I.The documentary “The Picture Taker,” directed by Phil Bertelsen (“Who Killed Malcolm X?”), uses this fact as an entry point into a compelling biography of Withers, whose photographs helped chronicle important events in the civil rights movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final days spent supporting the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis.“The Picture Taker” presents several perspectives on Withers’s link to the F.B.I. and noticeably does not come down on a particular side — unlike “Judas and the Black Messiah,” a 2021 historical drama about the murder of the activist and Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, which took up similar subject matter.But the reason to watch the documentary isn’t for the debate about Withers’s motives. It’s to see his impressive archive, which Bertelsen was smart to build the film around.
      From his coverage of the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi to the weddings and first communions of everyday Black people in Memphis, Withers’s photographs give the documentary a visual language that coheres from start to finish.“The Picture Taker” artfully plays with rendering the photographic image for the screen. It graphically alters Withers’s likeness, transforming pictures of him into telling animations and cutouts that pull him out of the background in which he so often dwelled and into the foreground.Ultimately, the film immerses viewers in Withers’s considerable storytelling abilities as an image-maker at the same time that it examines his motives for taking those very pictures — that tension is what makes for an engrossing watch.The Picture TakerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Artists Turning Nina Simone’s Childhood Home Into a Creative Destination

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      Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher are working both to preserve and transform the North Carolina house where she was born.IN 1997, WHEN he was 20 years old, the New York-based artist Rashid Johnson traveled with a friend from their hometown, Chicago, to Ghana, on a pilgrimage to the final resting place of the most prominent Black intellectual of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois. Arriving in Accra, Johnson enacted a ritual familiar to Black Americans across generations: that of searching for home in a lost ancestral past. More than 30 years earlier, in 1961, Du Bois, disillusioned after a life spent fighting Jim Crow racism, had left the United States for Ghana at the invitation of the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. Two years later, he became a Ghanaian citizen, and on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington, he died. “I remember just being in this house and feeling his presence,” Johnson, now 45, recalls.T’s Spring Design Issue: A Place to Make ArtWhere creativity lives, from Los Angeles to the German countryside.- Located on the grounds of a former agricultural collective an hour north of Berlin, the artist Danh Vo’s farmhouse brings together all kinds of creative talents.- Inspired by Nina Simone’s invaluable legacy, the artists Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher decided to purchase and preserve her childhood home.- It was a hands-on renovation of one couple’s Greenwich Village apartment that prompted them to start designing home goods.- The focal points of this Edwardian townhouse in northwest London? The eccentric bathrooms.Five years ago, Johnson partnered with three other prominent Black American artists — the conceptualist Adam Pendleton, the abstract painter Julie Mehretu and the collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher — to help bring another towering ancestor into focus: the genre-defying musical performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Simone’s childhood home, located in Tryon, N.C., a small town of 1,600 nestled at the base of the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was at risk of succumbing to age and neglect. Once the artists were made aware of this, they bought the house, for $95,000, in 2017. The following year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated it a national treasure.The French historian Pierre Nora invented the concept of les lieux de mémoire, “sites of memory” — be they places or personas, objects or concepts — that contribute to the symbolic coherence of a nation’s identity. In 2022, much as in the 1960s when Simone answered the call to activism, the United States is openly contesting its collective identity. Some seek a return to an imagined America whose greatness depends on selective erasure of its diverse and complex history. “We live in a moment when half the country would be perfectly content to forget somebody like Nina Simone,” Pendleton says. “What a precarious state; what a precarious place to be culturally, historically.”The artists have an important partner in Brent Leggs, the executive director of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Launched in 2017, the action fund aims to identify and preserve what Leggs calls “nationally significant projects that express the Black experience.” Leggs, 49, saw in the modest clapboard home the very qualities that make many historical Black American sites so necessary — and so vulnerable to loss. “I was inspired by the simplicity of this unadorned vernacular structure that at first glance might appear to be missing history and meaning,” he says. “I believe deeply that places like the Nina Simone childhood home deserve the same stewardship and admiration as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate.”Eunice Kathleen Waymon, a.k.a. Nina Simone, at age 8, photographed at the Tryon Cemetery in Tryon, N.C.© The Nina Simone Charitable Trust, courtesy of Dr. Crys Armbrust, Nina Simone Project Archive Simone performing at the 1968 Newport Jazz Festival.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNINA SIMONE WAS born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in the 660-square-foot house at 30 East Livingston Street. Simone’s mother was an ordained minister and domestic worker; her father ran his own dry-cleaning business and worked as a handyman. Modest though the home might seem today, back then it embodied the promise of prosperity. The Waymons’ plot of land afforded them room for a vegetable garden. They enjoyed other small luxuries, as well, as described in Nadine Cohodas’s 2010 biography, “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone”: a stove in two of the three rooms to keep the house warm during cold months and to heat water for bathing; a small pump organ where Eunice picked out her first notes; a swing in the yard; even a tennis court just across the street. The exercise of segregation was more nuanced in Tryon than it was in large metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Atlanta, but it nonetheless exerted itself as a palpable lack. Simone, her parents and her siblings (she was the sixth of eight children) lived in the home until early 1937, when her father suffered an intestinal illness that left him incapacitated for a time. The next several years were itinerant, the family moving to close to half a dozen now-forgotten homes in and around Tryon.Those early years on Livingston Street established Simone’s foundation as an artist. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” Simone wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You.” “It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.” Her mother, Mary Kate, sang church songs to her daughter; her father, John, introduced her to jazz and the blues. By the time Eunice was 4, she was accompanying her mother on piano as she preached Sunday sermons at St. Luke C.M.E. Church.The years that followed were quite literally the stuff of storybooks (two children’s books about Simone’s life have come out in the last five years): Recognized as a prodigy, Eunice studied under a white woman, whom she called Miss Mazzy, who schooled her in Beethoven and Bach; the town rallied around Eunice and raised money to support her education, including time in New York City, at Juilliard; soon thereafter, she faced wrenching rejection from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, where she had hoped to continue her studies in classical music; instead, she made a surprising star turn as a lounge singer at an Atlantic City, N.J., nightclub, leading to a recording contract; a string of hits followed for Eunice (now called Nina); then, galvanized by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, she achieved artistic complexity and individualism through what she would later call “civil rights music.”The artists on the grounds of the property.Nydia BlasLike Du Bois, Simone was an expat: When she died in 2003, after a protracted illness, she was living in Carry-le-Rouet, a small seaside town in the south of France, some 4,500 miles away from the house on East Livingston Street where she had been born 70 years earlier. Even though she lived nearly half her life outside of the United States — from Liberia to the Netherlands and beyond before settling in France — she remained forever enlisted in the cause of racial justice in America. Simone’s enduring power emanates from her art and from her activism, as well as from her activist art. Her biggest hits — “I Loves You, Porgy,” “Trouble in Mind,” “I Put a Spell on You” — are ingenious reinventions of other people’s songs grappling with love, loss and longing. But her most cherished recordings — “Four Women,” “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” “Mississippi Goddam” — are original compositions that give voice to an insurgent Black pride and defiance. It is these qualities, this complexity of vision, to which the four artists respond.“I think the most interesting question is ‘why, why, why?’” Pendleton says. Why Nina? Why now? For him, the answers are clear. “I’m interested in the questions that Nina Simone’s legacy raises. And these are not just questions about music; [they’re] questions about the avant-garde, about abstraction, about how artists speak to each other across generations and across time.” Pendleton, 38, whose work often incorporates language layered like a palimpsest, finds his artistic connection to Simone in a shared commitment to the complexity, at times the indeterminacy, of voice. (Simone once said of her vocal instrument, “Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.”) Listening to recordings like “Sinnerman” or “Feeling Good” or “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” which she performed in the days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, “demands a kind of deep listening, a kind of geometry of attention,” Pendleton explains.It is fitting, if unexpected, that a group of visual artists — not musicians — came together to rescue Simone’s childhood home. They share common goals: that the home be preserved as a place of artistic creation and invention; that it support aspiring artists, particularly those pursuing the path from which Simone was excluded, in classical performance and composition. In the fashion of Simone’s classical compositional approach, the artists offer variations on these shared themes. Pendleton wonders if the home might function like a StoryCorps site, providing a space for oral history and reflection. Mehretu, 51, thinks it could “offer a refuge and a space of development” for creative people. Johnson, perhaps inspired by his travels to Ghana, imagines it as a site of pilgrimage — in both the physical and the virtual worlds. Leggs understands all of these visions and more coming together as part of the enduring legacy of the home, and ensuring that Tryon, as Leggs puts it, “has a Black future.”The language of historical preservation — easements, adaptive reuse, stewardship planning — might not inspire much passion. But in the mouths of Leggs and the four artists, these words become incantations. Collectively, they understand that while Simone’s childhood home is a potent symbol, it is also a century-old structure in need of maintenance and basic upkeep. It’s a contrast worthy of Simone herself, a singer both of show tunes and knife-sharp indictments of racist duplicity, a loving freedom fighter and truculent aggressor, a figure who tests our capacity to contain the challenging but essential facets of our national history. Nearly two decades after her death, she is still bearing witness, living her life after life through the artists she inspires in the house where she was born. More

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      Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94

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      The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No cause was given.Sidney Poitier was the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry.Matt Sayles/Associated PressMr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.Mr. Poitier with, from left, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967). He played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws.Columbia Pictures“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him. In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert. Mr. Poitier and Lilia Skala in “Lilies of the Field” (1963), for which Mr. Poitier won an Oscar. United ArtistsIn 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote.Mr. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, but he was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami, where his parents traveled regularly to sell their tomato crop. The youngest of nine children, he wore clothes made from flour sacks and never saw a car, looked in a mirror or tasted ice cream until his father, Reginald, moved the family from Cat Island to Nassau in 1937 after Florida banned the import of Bahamian tomatoes.When he was 12, Mr. Poitier quit school and became a water boy for a crew of pick-and-shovel laborers. He also began getting into mischief, and his parents, worried that he was becoming a juvenile delinquent, sent him to Miami when he was 14 to live with a married brother, Cyril.Mr. Poitier played a Philadelphia detective and Rod Steiger played a bigoted Mississippi sheriff in “In the Heat of Night,” one of three hit films in which Mr. Poitier appeared in 1967.Mirisch/United Artists, The Kobal CollectionMr. Poitier had known nothing of segregation growing up on Cat Island, so the rules governing American Black people in the South came as a shock. “It was all over the place like barbed wire,” he later said of American racism. “And I kept running into it and lacerating myself.”In less than a year he fled Miami for New York, arriving with $3 and change in his pocket. He took jobs washing dishes and working as a ditch digger, waterfront laborer and delivery man in the garment district. Life was grim. During a race riot in Harlem, he was shot in the leg. He saved his nickels so that on cold nights he could sleep in pay toilets.In late 1943 Mr. Poitier lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, becoming an orderly with the 1267th Medical Detachment at a veterans hospital on Long Island. Feigning a mental disorder, he obtained a discharge in 1945 and returned to New York, where he read in The Amsterdam News that the American Negro Theater was looking for actors.His first audition was a flop. With only a few years of schooling, he read haltingly, in a heavy West Indian accent. Frederick O’Neal, a founder of the theater, showed him the door and advised him to get a job as a dishwasher.Undeterred, Mr. Poitier bought a radio and practiced speaking English as he heard it from a variety of staff announcers. A kindly fellow worker at the restaurant where he washed dishes helped him with his reading. Mr. Poitier finally won a place in the theater’s acting school, but only after he volunteered to work as a janitor without pay.His lucky break came when another actor at the theater, Harry Belafonte, did not show up for a rehearsal attended by a Broadway producer. Mr. Poitier took the stage instead and was given a part in an all-Black production of “Lysistrata” in 1946. Although panned by the critics, it led to a job with the road production of “Anna Lucasta.”“No Way Out” was followed by a sprinkling of film and television roles, but Mr. Poitier still bounced between acting jobs and menial work.In 1951 he married Juanita Marie Hardy, a dancer and model, whom he divorced in 1965. They had four daughters, Beverly, Pamela, Sherri and Gina. In 1976 he married Joanna Shimkus, his co-star in “The Lost Man” (1969), a film about a gang of Black militants plotting to rob a factory. They had two daughters, Anika and Sydney.Ms. Shimkus survives him. His daughter Gina Patrice Poitier Gouraige died in 2018. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Poitier with Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), which established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.United ArtistsAfter breakout movies like “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Defiant Ones,” Mr. Poitier’s fate was tied to Hollywood, his purpose to expand the boundaries of racial tolerance. “The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience,” he later wrote.In “The Defiant Ones” and “In the Heat of the Night,” racial politics coincided with meaty roles. Just as often, however, Mr. Poitier found himself playing virtuous messengers of racial harmony in mawkish films like “A Patch of Blue” (1965) or taking race-neutral roles in less than memorable films, like a newspaper reporter in the Cold War naval drama “The Bedford Incident” (1965), Simon of Cyrene in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) or the former cavalry sergeant in “Duel at Diablo” (1966). “The Defiant Ones” remained one of Mr. Poitier’s favorite films, but to get the part he had to cross swords with Samuel Goldwyn, who was assembling a cast for “Porgy and Bess.” After Mr. Belafonte turned down the role of Porgy as demeaning, Mr. Goldwyn set his sights on Mr. Poitier, who also regarded the musical as an insult to Black people. As Mr. Poitier told it in his lively, unusually frank first memoir, “This Life” (1980), Mr. Goldwyn pulled strings to ensure that unless Mr. Poitier played Porgy, the director Stanley Kramer would not hire him for “The Defiant Ones.”Mr. Poitier, seething, bowed to the inevitable. “I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I have not yet completely forgiven myself,” he told The New York Times in 1967.The critics who would later accuse him of bowing and scraping before the white establishment seemed to dismiss Mr. Poitier’s longstanding, outspoken advocacy for racial justice and the civil rights movement, most visibly as part of a Hollywood contingent that took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Early in his career, his association with left-wing causes and his friendship with the radical singer and actor Paul Robeson made him a politically risky proposition for film and television producers.His style, however, remained low-key and nonconfrontational. “As for my part in all this,” he wrote, “all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role.”Mr. Poitier with Claudia McNeil in the 1959 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Reviewing his performance, Brooks Atkinson of The Times wrote, “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control.”Leo FriedmanIn 1959 Mr. Poitier made a triumphant return to Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” winning ecstatic reviews. “Mr. Poitier is a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “Cast as the restless son, he vividly communicates the tumult of a high-strung young man. He is as eloquent when he has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak. He can convey devious processes of thought as graphically as he can clown and dance.” Mr. Poitier repeated the role in the 1961 film version of the play.With the rise of Black filmmakers like Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mr. Poitier, now in his 40s, turned to directing and producing. He had proposed the idea for the romantic comedy “For Love of Ivy” (1968), in which he starred with Abbey Lincoln. After joining with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand in 1969 to form a production company called First Artists, he directed the western “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which he acted opposite Mr. Belafonte, and a series of comedies, notably “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974) and “Let’s Do It Again” (1975), in which Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby teamed up to play a pair of scheming ne’er-do-wells, and “Stir Crazy” (1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.The critics thought little of Mr. Poitier’s directing talents, but enthusiastic audiences, Black and white, made all three films box-office hits. Neither audiences nor critics found much to like in subsequent directorial efforts, like the comedy “Hanky Panky” (1982), with Mr. Wilder and Gilda Radner, or “Ghost Dad” (1990), with Mr. Cosby as a dead father who refuses to leave his three children alone.President Barack Obama presented Mr. Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his later years, Mr. Poitier turned in solid performances in forgettable action films and thrillers like “Shoot to Kill” (1988), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “Sneakers” (1992). It was television that provided him with two of his grandest roles.In 1991 he appeared in the lead role in the ABC drama “Separate but Equal,” a dramatization of the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In 1997 he delivered a widely praised performance as Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and de Klerk,” a television movie focusing on the final years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment by the white-minority government in South Africa, with Michael Caine in the role of President F.W. de Klerk.“Sidney Poitier and Nelson Mandela merge with astonishing ease, like a double-exposure photograph in which one image is laid over the other with perfect symmetry,” Caryn James wrote in a review in The New York Times.In 2002, Mr. Poitier was given an honorary Oscar for his career’s work in motion picture. (At that same Oscar ceremony, Denzel Washington became the first Black actor since Mr. Poitier to win the best-actor award, for “Training Day.”) He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. And in 2009, President Barack Obama, citing his “relentless devotion to breaking down barriers,” awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mr. Poitier was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.Mr. Poitier’s memoir “This Life” was followed by a second, “The Measure of a Man,” in 2000. Subtitled “A Spiritual Autobiography,” it included Mr. Poitier’s thoughts on life, love, acting and racial politics. It generated a sequel, “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter” (2008).Despite his role in changing American perceptions of race and opening the door to a new generation of Black actors, Mr. Poitier remained modest about his career. “History will pinpoint me as merely a minor element in an ongoing major event, a small if necessary energy,” he wrote. “But I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.” Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More