This was not entirely unfair as a description. The Hollywood system of the 1950s and early 1960s was not prepared to make films in which Black characters’ interiority was the primary subject, because the industry had calculated, probably correctly, that the white audiences who made up the paying majority at most theaters would not buy that experience. Poitier was working within a system that he had not designed and could not unilaterally transform.
He also understood the critique. He addressed it in interviews during this period. He said, in various formulations, that he had made choices about the kinds of stories he wanted to tell and the kinds of characters he wanted to play, and that those choices had been made in the context of what was actually available to a Black actor in the American film industry. He was not claiming perfection. He was claiming agency within constraint.
1967 was the year that argument was made most forcefully by his own body of work.
In 1967, Sidney Poitier appeared in three films: In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and To Sir, With Love. All three were commercially successful. The first two became cultural reference points. In the Heat of the Night won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Poitier playing detective Virgil Tibbs — a man from Philadelphia who insists, in the face of white Southern hostility, on being addressed as Mister Tibbs. The film’s famous line — “They call me MISTER Tibbs!” — became one of the defining cultural artifacts of the decade.