He wrote. This Life, his autobiography, was published in 1980. It covered his childhood on Cat Island, his early years in New York, his career and its contradictions. It is, by multiple accounts, an honest book — honest about his failures as well as his achievements, honest about the costs of the particular life he had lived.
The waiter is in the book, as he is in every account Poitier gave of his formative years. The detail is consistent: an elderly Jewish man, a newspaper, nightly lessons after the restaurant closed, six months of instruction, gratitude that never found its target.
## Later Honors: The Decade Without an Oscar Nomination Ends
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a particular way of acknowledging when it got something wrong, or when the history of an institution has excluded in ways that the institution has subsequently decided to address. It gives honorary Oscars.
In 2002, at the 74th Academy Awards ceremony, Sidney Poitier received an honorary Oscar — the Academy’s Governors Award — for, in the official language, “remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being.” The award was presented by Denzel Washington, who that same evening won the competitive Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Training Day. Halle Berry won Best Actress the same night, for Monster’s Ball.
Two Black performers won competitive Oscars on the same night that the man who had first made it possible for Black performers to win competitive Oscars received his honorary recognition. The symbolism was noted. Denzel Washington noted it explicitly in his acceptance speech, saying that he would not have been there without Sidney Poitier.