Poitier himself makes this distinction repeatedly in his later writings. The Measure of a Man is, in significant part, an account of where that foundational self-worth came from — the father who taught him values, the community that gave him context, the landscape of Cat Island that remained in him as a reference point for everything that followed. The waiter and the ANT and the career are the story of a man building with the materials he already had. Cat Island is where the materials came from.
## The Civil Rights Backdrop: Art and History in the Same Decade
It would be a peculiar distortion to tell the story of Sidney Poitier’s career from the 1950 release of No Way Out to the 1964 Oscar win without acknowledging the decade of American history those years encompassed.
Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, the year before Blackboard Jungle. The Montgomery Bus Boycott ran from December 1955 to December 1956, while Poitier was filming Edge of the City. The Little Rock Central High School crisis was September 1957. The sit-ins began in February 1960. The Freedom Rides were 1961. The Birmingham campaign was 1963, the same year Lilies of the Field was released. The March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the speech that the decade would be remembered by, was August 28, 1963. The Oscar ceremony where Poitier won was April 13, 1964. The Civil Rights Act was July 2, 1964.
These events were not happening on a separate track from Poitier’s career. They were happening in the same country, at the same time, to the same people. The audiences that watched his films were watching them in a country that was being remade in real time, often violently, by the demand that Black Americans be treated as full citizens of the nation they had built.