It was the first time a Black man had been nominated in that category.
He did not win. But the nomination put him on a list. The Academy had acknowledged, formally, that this particular performance was among the finest in American film that year. Whatever doors that opened, whatever conversations it changed, whatever it said to studios about the commercial and critical viability of Sidney Poitier’s particular presence on screen — the nomination was a signal.
He had been reading fluently for about twelve years by then.
## A Raisin in the Sun and the Certainty of Vocation
Between The Defiant Ones and the Oscar win in 1964, Sidney Poitier did something that he would later describe as the most clarifying experience of his professional life.
He went back to the stage.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959. It was the first Broadway play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, and it arrived at a particular moment in American cultural and political life — the year before the lunch counter sit-ins, five years after Brown v. Board of Education, at the beginning of the decade that would be defined by the Civil Rights Movement.
Poitier played Walter Lee Younger, a chauffeur in Chicago’s South Side whose ambitions and frustrations and capacity for both self-destruction and resilience drive the play’s dramatic action. Walter Lee is not a hero in any simplified sense. He is a man under enormous pressure who makes bad choices and has to reckon with them, whose relationship with his family is as complicated as his relationship with his own dreams.