## The Ongoing Conversation: Legacy After 2022
Sidney Poitier has been gone since January 2022. But the conversation about his legacy is not over — in some respects, it has only deepened.
The questions that were being asked about his career during his lifetime — about the roles, the representation, the specific tradeoffs of integrationist heroism — have continued to be asked and refined and sometimes revised. The conversation is more complex than it was in 1967, when the criticism first sharpened, because there is more historical distance, more film history to compare, more critical frameworks available.
What has remained stable is the specific quality of his presence on screen. Whatever arguments one makes about the politics of the roles or the representation or the constraints of the industry, the performances themselves do not age in the way that more explicitly topical performances sometimes do. The scene in In the Heat of the Night where Virgil Tibbs slaps a white plantation owner who has slapped him — a moment that was shocking in 1967 and remains viscerally powerful now — is a piece of screen acting that does not require historical context to work. The quality of concentration and anger and controlled force in Poitier’s face in that moment is readable to anyone who has seen another human being decide, in real time, how to respond to an insult.
Lilies of the Field, forty years on, holds up in a similar way. The performance doesn’t feel like an artifact of its period. It feels like a man doing things — building, teaching, resisting and then yielding, finding something meaningful in a project he didn’t choose.