Poitier was not an activist in the street sense. He was not, primarily, an organizer. But he made choices throughout this period that were not without political content. He chose roles that refused the degradation that Hollywood had historically been comfortable demanding of Black performers. He chose roles that showed Black men as capable, dignified, complex. He refused, at some professional cost, roles that didn’t meet that standard.
He knew Harry Belafonte, who was more explicitly involved in the Civil Rights Movement’s organizational work. He knew and admired Martin Luther King Jr. He was present at the March on Washington, standing in the crowd on the National Mall with the 250,000 people who had gathered there.
The Oscar win in April 1964 did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a country that was eight months away from its most comprehensive civil rights legislation, in an industry that had just been forced by the activism of that same period to confront its own history of exclusion. The timing was not accidental. Everything that was happening in American public life was present, invisibly, in the room at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 13, 1964.
## The Roles He Turned Down and the Ones He Chose
Not everything Sidney Poitier was offered, he accepted. The choices he made about what to do are as revealing as the work itself.
He was offered Porgy and Bess in 1959 and had significant reservations about the material — a story originally written by white authors that had been contested within the Black community for decades, featuring characters whose depiction many found demeaning. He accepted it eventually, and the decision was a complicated one that he addressed in later interviews with candor about his own ambivalence.