Sidney attended school in Nassau but left early — around twelve or thirteen, by various accounts — to work. The formal education he received was fragmentary. He could read, but not fluently. He could write, but with difficulty. The gap between his intelligence and his educational preparation was real, and it would follow him through the next few years of his life.
In Nassau by fifteen, he had gotten himself into serious enough trouble that his father made a decision. His best friend Yorick Rolle had been sent to reform school for stealing a bicycle. Sidney had spent a night in jail. Reginald Poitier concluded that Nassau was not going to lead his youngest son anywhere good. He arranged for Sidney to go to Miami, where Sidney’s older brother Cyril was living.
Sidney left Nassau in January 1943. He was fifteen years old.
## Sixteen in a Country That Didn’t Want Him
What Sidney Poitier found in Florida was not opportunity. It was fear.
He arrived to live with his older brother Cyril, but the Miami of 1943 was a place where a young Black man from the Bahamas had to learn the specific geography of American racial terror, and to learn it quickly. Florida in the early 1940s operated under a system of legal segregation and extralegal violence that made daily life for Black residents a navigation of rules that could turn lethal if misread.
Poitier made at least one serious mistake. By his own account, he was nearly threatened by white men for some perceived violation of racial protocol — the details differ slightly across his retellings, but the emotional core remains consistent: he encountered the naked face of American racism in a form that was physically threatening, and he recognized immediately that he needed to leave.