Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner cast Poitier as a brilliant Black doctor engaged to a white woman, played out against the reactions of both sets of parents. The film starred Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, both of them at the ends of their careers, and it was Tracy’s final film before his death.
To Sir, With Love sent Poitier to London, to play a teacher in a tough East End school, in a film that became a major hit in the United Kingdom as well as in the United States.
Three films. The top box-office draw in America in 1967.
The criticism of his roles did not disappear after 1967. Some of it intensified. The Black Power movement, which was reshaping the political landscape in exactly these years, was not interested in integration fantasies, and some of Poitier’s most celebrated performances could be read as precisely that. He acknowledged the tension. He continued to work.
What his career demonstrated, in aggregate, was something that the American film industry had not previously had to publicly reckon with: that a Black actor could be, for a sustained period, the most commercially powerful leading man in the country. That the audience for his work was not merely the Black audience or the liberal white audience but something broader and more complicated.
That fact changed what studios could say about the audience and the market. It didn’t change everything. But it changed something real.
## The 1970s, the Work, and the Weight of Being First