This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected.
That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Warning. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups. A, B, C. T In the morning Brush your teeth.
A D C D morning for your speech. E F G H. Hurry up and don't be Late. E-F-G-H. Hurry up and don't be late.
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Dana White is bringing Power Slaps to Texas for the first time on the campus of Texas Tech University. Two massive title fights headlined the card, including slap fighting legend Wolverine. Also on the card is former WWE champion Jake Hager and the debut of former UFC heavyweight Chris Barnett. You can watch PowerSlap 23 for free on PowerSlap's YouTube channel. Thursday, September 17th for the first time from Texas.
Power Slap's biggest card of the year. This is the Dan Lebatar Show. This is Dan Lebatar, and I've been doing this for more than two decades. Our show is contagious. It's a little bit addictive.
It's uh. In the most positive of ways. It has a good amount of range from smart to silly, and it's got a journalistic backbone. Monday through Friday, I show up and talk about sports, listen to the Dan Lebetard show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You're grinding, putting tracks on Spotify, making TikToks, and watching fractions of a cent roll in.
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Now just 248 and 358. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and The American People Up next is story about Sidney Poitier. perhaps the most important actor of the twentieth century. and certainly an actor who taught us all how to live and how to conduct ourselves. Sidney Poitier, man-actor, icon, was the first full biography.
of Poitiers written by Aram Gudzusian, Professor of History at the University of Memphis. Let's take a listen. My name is Aaron Gadzusian. I'm a professor of history at the University of Memphis. And the first book I ever wrote was Sidney Poitier, Man, Actor, Icon, in 2004.
And that book was originally my PhD dissertation when I was a student at Purdue University. Sidney was born on Cat Island, which is one of the out islands in the Bahamas. In other words, it was a primarily rural agricultural island on the cusp of the Bahamas. And it was a fairly isolated place in his childhood when he was growing up in the 1930s. It was in the midst of the Great Depression.
It was a place that still had kind of a barter economy rather than a cash economy. And there was sort of a lot of freedom for a young child like Sidney Poitier to roam. Sydney was the youngest of seven children. I think there were five brothers and two sisters. The oldest brother, Cyril, was about 15 years older than he was.
And having a big family like the Poitiers, was more the rule than the exception on Cat Island because these were farming families for the most part. You know, the more children you had, the more people you could put to work.
So they were instilled with these values of hard work and personal discipline. From the earliest beginnings. Cat Allen was an idol. It was a play, you know, he was there when he was still a young boy. And he just remembers being able to roam freely, to play, to swim, to fish.
For young children. Cat Island was a gigantic playground. After chores, Sidney often roamed the island unsupervised, wandering down narrow, flower-lined paths. building mud huts, collecting turtle eggs, swimming in the Atlantic. and climbing sapodilla trees to shake down the plump, grey brown fruit, and eat until his stomach ached.
He caught fish, added peppers and limes, and stewed it in a can over a fire on the beach. his imagination drifted out to sea, to the world beyond Cat Island. I'd stand on the piers, he recalled. and watched the ships until they disappeared, and then I'd just stare at that line and dream. I was a real dreamer.
I'd conjure up the kind of worlds that were on the other side and what I'd do in them.
So many hours I stared at that line. He would later credit that as kind of giving him the some of the tools of an actor, the physical expressiveness, the ability to sort of experiment physically, just sort of gave him a s a sense of his body, as he put it, that would benefited him in in his professional career as an actor. But at the same time, there was crushing poverty. And so his family moved to the capital city of Nassau. And it was there that Plaudio really started to Have to endure more struggles.
He was growing into his teenage years, but now he was in an urban environment. He would sometimes engage in petty crime, and he ran into trouble sometimes with the colonial authorities because the Bahamas was still a British colony at the time. And this was really sort of rubbed his father the wrong way. His father, Reginald Poitier, was very much a disciplinarian, a man who had survived basically on the basis of his hard work. He'd been a tomato farmer back in Cat Island and just was used to backbreaking labor.
And his father really emphasized lessons of personal virtue, of hard work, of taking responsibility for yourself. And the famous lesson that he cast down to his son was that the measure of a man is how he provides for his family. And that was the lesson that kept coming back to Sidney as he grew into adulthood, as he reflected on his own life later on. That was the big legacy that his father had left him.
So His mother, Evelyn, was the one who basically taught him more the lessons of how to be a good human, how to live amongst others, how to be a participating member in society. And he saw that firsthand in some of the jobs that she had to take on when they moved to Nassau. Uh, when Reginald had become sort of too old and too frail and too sickly to work successfully, and she took all the odd jobs she could to provide for the family. She uh even took a job that pounded called pounding rock, basically turned turning rock into powder. Um And she was the one who especially insisted on sort of the personal codes of respect for others, of looking out for your family.
She enforced that more on a daily level in his life. And these were values, the values of his parents were values that would stick with them forever. Toward the end of his life, he was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors. And when everyone in the massive theater was standing and applauding. and cheering him, he he stood up and he looked up into the skies and you could and you could see him mouth my mother.
My father.
So It was almost by an accident of history that Sidney Poitier had American citizenship. He was born in Miami only because his parents had sailed to Miami to sell their tomato crop. And Sidney was not due to be born still for quite some time. But then, while they were in Miami, his mother, Evelyn, gave birth to him prematurely. And it appeared that he wasn't going to survive.
To the point where his father even went out and bought. a tiny coffin uh to bury him in that was no bigger than a shoebox. But his mother fiercely insisted that Sidney would survive, that he would live. And she even went to the point of visiting a soothsayer. Fortune teller.
And the fortune teller assured her that he would live, that he would grow on to to do great things, that he would even walk with kings. And Evelyn just sort of absorbed that message. She took it as sort of an element of faith, and she went back to her husband and said, You know, no, this child is going to live. We're going to nurse him to health. And that's what happened.
And you're listening to Aram Godzouzian. Tell the story of Sidney Pottier. And what a story indeed. He grows up in this idyllic real remote part of the Bahamas called Cat Island. and he was able to roam free, a part of a rural family background, and every other family was like it.
Lots of kids because they were labor, but then all that time to roam free and imagine and dream and play. And then he goes to Nassau, the bigger city. and things start to turn south, he starts to get into trouble. A boy, did we learn a lot about his mother and his father, and we already start to understand more about this remarkable actor and his life's work. My goodness, watch his movies now, hearing what we just heard, and you'll understand so much more about Sidney Poitier's life when we come back.
More of the life story of Sidney Poitier here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country. Stories from our big cities and small towns, but we truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to ouramericanstories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to ouramericanstories.com and give. Hey, our ride's almost here. Are you ready?
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So many reasons to join T-Mobile. Find yours at T-Mobile.com. FASTAS based on analysis by OCLO Speed Test Intelligence data of national speed score results incorporating 5G download and upload speeds for the first half of 2026. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S.
and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans.
It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Mom, are we there yet? 10 more minutes. Only 10 minutes?
Can you drive slower? What's up with them today? Lingo Kids. That app we downloaded last week? They love it.
The games, this funny baby bot character. Kids, we're almost there. No! With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs, and shows little ones can't get enough of, Lingo Kids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids. Why didn't we download this sooner?
Everything kids love. Download it for free. PowerSlap 23 is live and free on YouTube on Thursday, September 17th. Dana White is bringing Power Slaps to Texas for the first time on the campus of Texas Tech University. Two massive title fights headlined the card, including slap fighting legend Wolverine.
Also on the card is former WWE champion Jake Hager and the debut of former UFC heavyweight Chris Barnett. You can watch PowerSlap 23 for free on PowerSlap's YouTube channel. Thursday, September 17th for the first time from Texas. Power Slap's biggest card of the year. This is the Dan Lebatar Show.
This is Dan Lebatar, and I've been doing this for more than two decades. Our show is contagious. It's a little bit addictive. It's uh. In the most positive of ways.
It has a good amount of range from smart to silly, and it's got a journalistic backbone. Monday through Friday, I show up and talk about sports, listen to the Dan Lebetard show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You're grinding, putting tracks on Spotify, making TikToks, and watching fractions of a cent roll in. Exposure doesn't pay rent. Time for real steaks.
Welcome to The Beam, the new music competition app. Real fans vote. Brands buy your music before it breaks. You win money and exposure. No more chasing algorithms.
Just compete and get paid. Download The Beam at TheBeam.com or on the App Store. Submit your tract. Earn what your music deserves on The Beam, the only chart that writes checks. And we continue here with Our American Stories and with Aaron Kutsuzian.
And Aram is the author of Sidney Poitier, Man, Actor, Icon. Let's return to Aram for more of the story. Again, by this accident that he was born in Miami, that would end up having a transformative effect on his life. Because when Poitier made the choices that he made that sort of could get him in trouble in the way that happened to many black teenagers living in Nassau around that time. It sort of stirred a family drama in that sense.
Because when he was 15 years old, he was shipped off back to Miami to live with a brother, Cyril, who was already living there. And Sydney already had American citizenship, so it sort of paved a path for him to come to the United States. And that began the next chapter in his life. In the Bahamas, there's a black majority. The majority of the population is black.
And so there weren't the same codes of segregation, there weren't the same codes of direct racial exploitation that Sidney was very shocked to find when he came to Miami, which was part of the Jim Crow South in this era. And he found himself just absolutely flummoxed by. Not only legal segregation, but also the informal codes that govern black life in the South.
So, one of the odd jobs that he picked up when he moved to Miami was working as a delivery boy. And the first time that he did a delivery in a white neighborhood, he knocked on the front door. And the person who answered the door screamed at him and told him to go to the back door. And he had no idea why he would do that. But that was the racial code of the time.
A black person is not supposed to go to the front door of a white person's home. And he was so sort of flummoxed that he just left the delivery at the front door and bicycled away. Mm-hmm.
So, after some time in Miami, Sidney knew that he wanted to leave. He knew that the racial codes of the deep south were not for him and he needed to get out of there. And he didn't really even really know how to do it at first. You know, he tried to hop on a train, just assuming that it would take him to the north, you know, sort of living by sort of this mythical idea of you could hop on a train to the north, and he would often end up, you know, in the middle of nowhere. Ultimately, he ended up taking a job at a resort outside of Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked for a summer doing menial labor.
And that gave him enough money and enough experience to figure out how to buy a train ticket to go further north. And he bought a ticket to New York. And so he shows up in New York. He's still, you know, just a kid, really, and is.
Sort of searching for his way. He's in his late teens, he doesn't know anyone in the city. While there are many West Indian immigrants in, Harlem at that time, the Bahamian community was quite small there, so he didn't have any natural context in that sense. And so he showed up, he was able to rent a room with some of his scratchings, but wasn't able to sort of sustain it. There were nights when he slept in pay toilets, because that was all he could afford to do.
There were nights when he slept on rooftops because he couldn't afford a place to stay. He didn't have any warm clothes because this is a kid who'd grown up in the Bahamas and then was in Miami.
So when winter hit, it was particularly tough for him. And so he survived by doing odd jobs. The primary job that he often did was work as a dishwasher in a restaurant. And so he was, you know, the way that he found work was often by he'd pull up the New York Amsterdam News, the black newspaper in New York City, and look at the Help Wanted section. And then one day he came across this ad that said, Actors Wanted, American Negro Theater.
And he said, you know, I've been a dishwasher, I've done all these other jobs. I'll try this.
Okay.
So Poitier came to the American Negro Theater, which was housed in the 135th Street Library in the heart of Harlem. And the person who answered the door was Frederick O'Neill when he knocked on it. And Frederick O'Neill was kind of this giant of black theater. He was one of the founders of the American Negro Theater, just this absolutely intimidating figure. And he put Poitier through an audition and realized that he was a guy who had basically no experience as an actor, still spoke with kind of a sing-song West Indian accent.
And as Poitier remembers it anyway, O'Neill kicked him out and said, why don't you go get a job as a dishwasher or something? And of course, because Sidney had worked as a dishwasher, this sort of burned in his soul. How could this guy say this to me? And so he resolved that he was going to... Become an actor.
It was still sort of this Quixotic idea for him at the time. But he also had that sort of code of personal discipline where he figured out how to do it. He went back, he did some more auditions. They needed more men because there were more women in the troop than there were men.
So they let him sort of stick around. He worked as like doing odd jobs for the theater so that they would continue to let him take the classes and become part of the organization. And he trained himself to speak in a more American way. He would imitate the voices on the radio. He would go back to his small room and he would hear the voice on the radio say, How do you do, gentlemen?
And he would learn to say, How do you do, gentlemen? He also had in the other jobs that he worked like he worked in a restaurant and he was a dishwasher and he was trying to learn how to read but he was he hadn't you know he had just the the basic rudiments of it by the time that he was arriving in in Harlem in the 1940s In one of the restaurants that he worked at, there was a waiter, an elderly Jewish man that he would later sort of credit as having this incredibly important influence on his life, who took a shine to him and agreed to try to help him learn to read.
So, after they were done with their shifts, they would sit down together and the man would help him learn. And for Proteus, this had an enormous effect. He would go on to become a voracious reader. He would absorb information, he was constantly reading, he was constantly entertained by ideas. And he was someone who was sort of only half literate, really, into his teenage years.
So this is, you know, here's just a story of one man's benevolence having a lasting effect on someone who would go on to have national and international influence. After this long apprenticeship with the American Negro Theater, where he basically learned how to be an actor, Poirier got his first break in the late 1940s. He was cast in Anilukasta, which was a play that the American Negro Theater had adapted from a Polish play called Anolukaska and had turned it into kind of a minor hit. And it started to even play on Broadway, and then there were these touring companies that went around the country. And Poirier got to join these touring companies.
And that was sort of his baptism in the world of the black theater. And so he was acting alongside people like Ossie Davis and Ruby D, you know, people who become lifelong friends. And he got all sorts of experiences and got to see the United States as they traveled around and was able to earn some money. But into the late 1940s, Poitier's career was very much piecemeal. He had a stage opportunity here, a bit part in a play here.
The American Negro Theater was starting to fall apart by the end of the 1940s because a lot of its actors were using it as a launching pad to get Broadway roles. And the American Negro Theater had imagined itself as a independent black theater that was there for the African-American community. And so there was always this constant tension between uptown and downtown in that sense. And it was also the beginnings of the Red Scare. And a lot of the people in Poitiers Milieu.
We were part of that sort of leftist world. Harlem was in many ways the center of radical political activity in those early years of the Cold War. In fact, the Communist Party moved its headquarters to Harlem in the early 1950s. And they established various organizations, sort of cultural organizations, that were sponsored by the Communist Party.
Some of the acting jobs that he got were through this organization called the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, which kind of supplanted the American Negro Theater as the primary outlet for black theater talent. But it was an organization that was a Communist Front organization, it was funded by the Communist Party.
So this was the political world that Poitier was negotiating just as his Hollywood career was starting to take off. And we're listening to author Aaron Gudzhusian tell the story of Sidney Poitier. Aram is a professor of history at the University of Memphis. And by the way, we asked him about whether Poitier knew whether he was working for a front group of the Communist Party. And it was a no.
We just wanted to clear that up, not trying to imply that Poitier knew he was working for a front group of the Communist Party. And by the way, what a life, what a piece of storytelling. He experiences the heart. Of segregation in Miami in the 1940s, and it's a ruthless art. and he couldn't believe it, it shocked him.
And he escaped to New York. To live well. wherever he could, sleeping on rooftops, in toilets. And then one man saves his life, really, and that's Frederick O'Neill. He doesn't give him a gold star for his crummy audition.
He tells him he's no good. Thanks to Sidney's father and his mother. He has both the discipline, the resilience, and the perseverance. To become the actor he'd always dreamed of. But that rejection was important to Sidney.
When we come back, more of the life story of Sidney Poitier here on Our American Stories.
Okay, sis, give me the scoop. What have you been up to? Living my best life. I've been traveling, working, even hiking more, and thanks at T-Mobile. I'm connected for all of it.
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I don't even get reception in my apartment. This is why I'm mom's favorite.
So many reasons to join T-Mobile. Find yours at T-Mobile.com. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Ooglu Speed Test Intelligence Data First Half of 2026. With compatible device in most outdoor areas and select countries where you can see the sky, included with experience beyond or $10 a month, auto-renews monthly against LanyTime. High-speed data on select plans not for extended international use coverage, not available in some areas.
See plan for details. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter.
Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way.
The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q.
Warning. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups. One, two, three. Three, four. One.
Two, three, four. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Five, six. Who is it?
Five, six. Who is it? It's Callie and it is. It's Callie and L. Lingo kids, only suitable for kids.
If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Everything kids love. Download now for free. PowerSlap 23 is live and free on YouTube on Thursday, September 17th. Dana White is bringing Power Slaps to Texas for the first time on the campus of Texas Tech University.
Two massive title fights headlined the card, including slap fighting legend Wolverine. Also on the card is former WWE champion Jake Hager and the debut of former UFC heavyweight Chris Barnett. You can watch PowerSlap 23 for free on PowerSlap's YouTube channel. Thursday, September 17th for the first time from Texas. Power Slap's biggest card of the year.
This is the Dan Lebatar Show. This is Dan Lebatar, and I've been doing this for more than two decades. Our show is contagious. It's a little bit addictive. It's uh.
In the most positive of ways. It has a good amount of range from smart to silly, and it's got a journalistic backbone. Monday through Friday, I show up and talk about sports, listen to the Dan Lebetard show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You're grinding, putting tracks on Spotify, making TikToks, and watching fractions of a cent roll in. Exposure doesn't pay rent.
Time for real steaks. Welcome to The Beam, the new music competition app. Real fans vote. Brands buy your music before it breaks. You win money and exposure.
No more chasing algorithms. Just compete and get paid. Download TheBeam at thebeam.com or on the App Store. Submit your tract. Earn what your music deserves on The Beam, the only chart that writes checks.
And we continue with our American stories and the story of Sidney Poitier. And we're talking with Aram Kudzusian, who wrote the book Sidney Poitier, Man, Actor, Icon. Let's return to Aram. and more of the life story. of Sydney Potter.
Poirier got his first break in Hollywood in 1949 for a film that came out in 1950 called No Way Out. And No Way Out was at the very end of a cycle of movies in Hollywood that were known as message movies, movies that were designed to combat racial prejudice. Gentleman's Agreement is probably the most famous of these movies starring Gregory Peck that was about anti-Semitism. And No Way Out was a film in which Poitier played a doctor, a young doctor, who had treated a white patient who died and his brother was vengeful and racist and was sort of out to get Poitier as the doctor. And toward the end of this film, Poitier's character admits to committing a murder just so that there'll be an investigation and an autopsy into the body, which will ultimately defuse the story.
So he makes this incredible sacrifice as this character. And in a lot of ways, Partier's Doctor in No Way Outsets the Template. for Poitier's entire career, basically his image. And it's in many ways presenting a new black image on screen. There were blacks who'd been sort of sexual threats, going back to movies like Birth of a Nation.
And Poitier was not that at all. He played this very mannered middle-class man who had a prim housewife. There were characters who were song and dance men, like Bill Robinson, for instance. And Poitier does not sing or dance, he's a dramatic actor. There were characters who were sort of comic buffoons, like Step and Fetchit.
And Pradier's character was not that. Again, he was this character who breathed dignity. And he was not someone who was, you know, who was threatening. He wasn't violent. In fact, he was sacrificial.
So this film in the message movie cycle. established a template where and established an image for Poitier as this sort of good black man who sacrifices on behalf of society and often helps out his white co-stars. In a lot of ways, he became kind of like a white liberal's fancy of what a black person should be like and a white liberal's construction of if black people are like this then how can we not integrate into society? How can we not become a more racially harmonious society?
So he became a political symbol in that sense. You have to know way out. Poitier does find film roles here and there, but he's still sort of struggling to squeak out an existence in Hollywood. Even to the point where he opens a restaurant in Harlem called Ribs in the Rough, a ribs restaurant, simply as a way, as a backup plan in case acting doesn't work out. But then party it gets is a big break.
With the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, which is in the midst of this sort of youth-oriented films that are showing appealing rebels. If you think of Marlon Brando and the Wild One or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Poitiers' character in Blackboard Jungle is a man named Gregory Miller, who's a teenager in a school in New York, and it's a bunch of rebellious boys who are in this classroom. And Poitier's character is electric in this role, in the sense that he's just breathes cool, he exudes this cool style. And at first, he's very resistant to the new white teacher played by Glenn Ford. But the teacher recognizes in Poitier's character.
this incredible ability to be a leader, to sway the whole classroom, and he basically courts him to his side. Hey Miller? Come on, I want to talk to you a minute, Miller. Command to man talk, come on. You know, I've been uh looking up the records and you're a natural born leader.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you are. Those guys out there, they like you very much. Don't be modest with me, Miller. You know that you're a little brighter, a little smarter than the rest of those guys. Me?
Yeah.
And every class needs a leader. You could be that leader, Miller. What you do, they'll do. You cooperate, they'll do it. follow you.
How about it, Miller? Sure, if you think so. That's your boy. Good. That's fine, Miller.
Take it easy, man. Sure, Matt.
So by the end of the film, Poadier ends up on the side of the teacher. against the more villainous white students who are against the teacher and want to knife the teacher at the end.
So Here's a character who ends up embodying Poitier's typical on-screen persona: the black man who helps the white man. Uh to negotiate through this difficult arc in the white person's career. But at the same time, he breathes such electricity into the role. He brings such charisma. into the character of Gregory Miller, that it becomes a um a role that vaults him into the next level of his career.
The film that really makes City Boy into a star, that gives him top billing on a Marquette, is The Defiant Ones, a film that comes out in 1958. It stars him opposite Tony Curtis. They play prisoners, one white, one black, who are chained to each other and they are able to escape. From a prison truck, and it's the story of their relationship. They hate each other at first, race divides them, they're each trying to scratch out some type of freedom but are chained to each other.
Both characters earned Oscar nominations for their role in this film. And again, just like in Blackboard Jungle, we saw with Poid with his character in this film, Noah Cullen. that he brings a lot of subtlety. to the role, sort of a humanity. to a character who could easily have become one-dimensional.
And that's what makes it such a powerful film and it was what makes it so appealing. At the same time, this is a film that also plays into the Poitier pattern of sacrifice. At the end of the film, the chain comes off the two of them, and they're still running away together, and they're on a train. And at the very end of the film, Poitier is able to hop onto the train that's going to take him to freedom, and Tony Curtis's character just can't make it. He's weak and wounded.
So rather than right off to freedom, Poitier's character jumps off the train and stays with his friend and cradles him at the very end. And there's a terrific story by James Baldwin about watching this film. The first time he watches the film, he watches it in a downtown New York theater. Most of the patrons are white. And at the end of the film, when Poitier leaps off the train and stays with a white person, the audience weeps and cheers and applauds.
And as Baldwin reads it, he says, you know, this is reassuring to them. This is telling them that black people are here for them, that we're not going to disrupt them. And he rolls his eyes to some degree at that. And that's actually what prompts him to go see the film for a second time in Harlem, among a primarily black audience. Of course, the movie goes the same way.
Poitier jumps off the train at the end. And this time the audience gets up and hoots and hollers and says, get back on the train, you fool.
So By the early 60s, Puerti is certainly emerging as a significant movie star. He has appeared in Defiant Ones, Porgy and Bess. He was on Raisin in the Sun, which had a long Broadway run and then was a successful film as well, in which he had this incredible performance as Walter Lee Younger. He really defined the role in terms of here's a young black man who's coming into his own and learning how to provide for his family and to show his dignity, even as he's facing an intensely racist society. And this is all, of course, occurring in the midst of the rising civil rights movement.
You have the Student Sit-In movement of 1960 that spreads throughout the South, the Freedom Rides in 1961 that bring integrated buses and these demonstrations that bring activists all throughout the Deep South. In 1962, you have James Meredith integrating the University of Mississippi, which leads to a riot to try to prevent him from attending, and ultimately federal marshals to protect him.
So there's kind of this early swelling momentum for the cause of African-American civil rights. is the only Black. Actor who is obtaining leading roles in Hollywood films throughout this time.
So he essentially is emerging as Hollywood's response to the civil rights movement. He is how Hollywood deals with race in the midst of the civil rights era, more or less through the character and icon of Sidney Poitier. And you've been listening to Aram Kudzian tell the story of Sidney Poitier. No way out was his way out in the end. And Richard Widmark played the part of the antagonist.
It was fascinating to listen to the account. of one of America's great black novelists and writers. And that's James Baldwin tells the story of seeing this movie in a white theater and a black theater, and the very different responses. What was remarkable about Poitier Was that he wasn't a song and dance man, the typical African-American song and dance man. He wasn't the comic, the buffoon.
Nor was he threatening, he was something new. And something dangerous to everybody, something lovable to everybody, too, when we come back. More of this remarkable story. We're talking about the life story. Sidney Poitier.
Here. on our American stories. Hey, our ride's almost here. Are you ready? Just grabbing my shoes.
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and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans.
It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
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Let's pick up now with Aram where he last left off. And in 1963, he makes a film called Lilies of the Field. This is a low-budget film. They only have two weeks to film the entire movie. And it basically revolves around Claudius' character, a man named Homer Smith, who's this.
Traveling handyman in the American Southwest, and he comes across a group of nuns, German nuns, who basically ask him to build them a chapel. And he ends up doing it, and he finds some kind of sort of self-worth in the story. But it's It's English lesson time. I build a chapel. I build the shop one.
You build a chapel. You build the shop one. Oh, we build a chapel. We build the shopping. Hmm.
Build it. Sure. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Amen. Amen. But also, again, here is the sort of classic Poitier character.
Sort of divorced from any kind of connection to a black community, just on his own, the sort of character of such innate goodness that he ultimately builds a chapel for these nuns out of the goodness of his heart. And it is a very heartwarming story. It's a sweet, well-told story. But it becomes something of a phenomenon. And part of it is its political timing.
It comes out in the fall of 1963. This is in the aftermath of the March on Washington, which was in August of that year. The massive demonstrations for civil rights throughout the country in the aftermath of the violence in Birmingham. And so Poitiers. character in that film kind of captures a certain mood.
So to speak, to the point where this is the film that gets him the Oscar for Best Actor. He wins the Academy Award in the spring of 1964 for Lilies of the Field. The nominees for the Best Performance by an Actor are Albert Finney and Tom Jones.
Okay.
Richard Harris in this sporting life. Rex Harrison and Cleopatra. Paul Newman in Harvey. Denis Poissier in Lilies of the Field. The winner is Significant Reigns.
And that creates new opportunities for Poitier, creates new visibility, it also creates new complications. Because the civil rights movement, as it continues to evolve, is approaching something of a crossroads, right? You have the philosophy of black power emerging by 1966 and becoming more popular, and it emphasizes black identity and black pride and some certain sense of disillusionment with the federal government, with white liberals, with sort of the mainstream themes of the civil rights era that City Party had seemed to embody. And in each of his films, Poiret continues to play some version of the same kind of character that he's always played. And each along the way, he's breaking new barriers.
In 1967, there's a poll that asks people Would you go see this film? just knowing that this actor is in it. And it turns out that Sidney Protier ranks as the most popular movie star in America based on this metric at the end of 1967. And so the there's a sense of sort of racial crisis bubbling in America over the course of the summer and into the fall of 1967. And it's at that point that three Poitiers movies come out in quick succession.
to serve with love in the heat of the night and guess who's coming to dinner. Mm. And each of these films i in in its way Carries on the Sidney Poitier image, the Sydney Poitier icon.
So, in a lot of ways, Poitiers' character kind of seems to represent kind of like a balm on those wounds. It soothes people's racial anxieties that black people can still be their friend, can still be mannered, can still be helpful, can still be non-violent, can still be Sydney Poitiers. And In the Heal of the Night, which comes out right after Two Saw with Love, builds on that idea. Within this film, of course, is the famous so-called slap herd around the world, and where Poitier's character is questioning this white aristocratic gentleman, and Poitier's line of questioning insults the man, and he slaps Poitier. and Plaidius' character slaps him right back.
And this is kind of a watershed moment for many African-American people, viewers of the time, right? They'd never been able to see this kind of black action, this kind of black resentment, rage expressed on screen. But the larger pattern in the film is still Poitier working with whites, right? That aristocrat is kind of the outlier. He's the villain in the story.
All three of these films in the heat of the night. Two store with love and guests who's coming to dinner, all top number one at the box office. And so Poitier is at this enormous peak of his start. And then it kind of drops off a cliff. Of course, in April of 1968, that's when Martin Luther King is assassinated.
And at the time, many people are seeing this as sort of the end of an era, right? The philosophy of nonviolence has somewhat run its course. There's a deep sense of disillusion among many black Americans and rage, of course, as well. But what's also happening by the late 1960s is that you have more and more black critics shaped by black power. Who are increasingly and openly critical of Poitiers.
And the most significant of these criticisms comes from a playwright, a guy named Clifford Mason, writing the New York Times toward the end of 1967. And the big headline in the New York Times that day was: Why does white America love Sidney Poitier so? And it's a brutal takedown of so many of Poitiers' films, and it includes some really harsh language against Poitiers. Critics are wondering: Is City Potter obsolete? Can he no longer really be a viable character because he continues to present this kind of image on screen in the early 70s?
And it's right around that time that we're seeing a new type of black hero appear on screen in the black exploitation movies, in Shaft and Superfly. And they're creating sort of an emotional resonance with a lot of black audiences at the time. They'd never really seen these kinds of characters on screen before. And so it's refreshing to many African-American audiences. But Poitier feels a sting from this.
In fact, he moves to the Bahamas at some point in the early 1970s for a few years, basically to just sort of get away from this sort of the political heat that has been established here. But he's also exceptionally resourceful. Very intelligent, connections all through Hollywood. He remains the most powerful black man in Hollywood in the 1970s. And so he uses that leverage in some ways that in ways that don't necessarily help his career, but help the larger plight of race on screen.
So he does a trio of comedies, for instance, Uptown Saturday Night, A Piece of the Action, Let's Do It Again, that star Bill Cosby and have Harry Belfonte and a few of them, Jimmy Walker. And these are really sort of feel-good movies that aren't in the black exploitation tradition. They're crossing over. They're exceptionally popular among black audiences, but they're also winning white audiences. And Party is directing these films.
And he's the one who's getting black people not just in front of the screens, but behind the cameras too. He's employing more black people in Hollywood than have ever really been employed before. But also, as he was able to get sort of get some distance, as he was able to tell his own story, as he became kind of a veteran in Black Hollywood, a mentor to actors like Denzel Washington or Will Smith, to the point where he's winning a lifetime achievement on Oscar in the early 2000s. You know, he's able to sort of reflect back. He writes a couple of memoirs that tell the story of his life.
So, like anyone who's approaching past middle age and into their older years, he's able to look back with pride on his accomplishments, and also because. The United States itself gets distanced from that. Tumultuous time, it's easier to appreciate the contributions that Sidney Poitier made in a way that might have been difficult for many Americans to see in the early 1970s, for instance.
So there is this more sort of long-standing appreciation of Poitiers' career that we see, you know, with his recent passing, it was the tone was naturally celebratory because he had been a barrier breaker and he had had to negotiate through these difficult times and make difficult choices that would have been a burden on anyone. And he'd managed it with much more grace and style and dignity than I think we have the right to expect.
So, it's 2003, and Barack Obama at this point is still very much an underdog candidate for the Senate. He's running in Illinois, of course, and his campaign manager is running these various focus groups. And you know, the black candidates in Illinois. Political history had been able to appeal primarily to a black constituency, but hadn't been able to cross-so. And his campaign manager is running this focus group, in particular with this group of white.
Women who are wealthy on the North Shore of Chicago and showing them images of the various candidates and what they think about them. And when they showed them the picture of Obama, And they say, what does this make you think about? One of the women says, Sidney Poitier. And it's at that moment that The campaign manager Jim Cauley says, whoa. This is real.
Here's a guy with actual crossover appeal. And one more example of the ways in which Sidney Poitier has shaped. The patterns of American life and the way that he has sort of appealed to the best in our nature. And a great job on the production by Greg Hengler. and a special thanks to Aram Katsuzian.
For his book and his effort here, telling the story, sharing the story. Of Sidney Poitier. His book, Sidney Poitier, Man, Actor, Icon. And well, buy the book. And if it's not there, order it from your local bookstore or wherever you get your books.
The Defiant Ones, if you've never seen it, see it. It gets him his first Oscar nomination, along with The great Tony Curtis. Lilies of the Field gets him his first Oscar. And in 1967, my goodness, to serve with love in the heat of the night, guess who's coming to dinner? Watch all three films with your family.
And what Poitier had to face, the black power movement didn't like him, and he was a threat and a challenge to many white races. And he held that line and taught us all how to live and to live with grace. In the end, Aram was right. He has appealed through his work. to the best in our nature.
The story of Sidney Poitier. here on Our American Stories. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected.
That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years.
And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q.
That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Warning. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups. A, B, C, D. In the morning, brush your teeth.
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Download now for free. PowerSlap 23 is live and free on YouTube on Thursday, September 17th. Dana White is bringing PowerSlap to Texas for the first time on the campus of Texas Tech University. Two massive title fights headlined the card, including slap fighting legend Wolverine. Also on the card is former WWE champion Jake Hager and the debut of former UFC heavyweight Chris Barnett.
You can watch PowerSlap 23 for free on PowerSlap's YouTube channel. Thursday, September 17th for the first time from Texas. PowerSlap's biggest card of the year. This is the Dan Lebatar Show. This is Dan Lebatar, and I've been doing this for more than two decades.
Our show is contagious. It's a little bit addictive. It's cooling. In the most positive of ways. It has a good amount of range from smart to silly, and it's got a journalistic backbone.
Monday through Friday, I show up and talk about sports, listen to the Dan Lebetard show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. You're grinding, putting tracks on Spotify, making TikToks, and watching fractions of a cent roll in. Exposure doesn't pay rent. It's time for real stakes. Welcome to The Beam, the new music competition app.
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Now just 248 and 358. Yeah.
