Rolling Stone: The FBI’s Persecution of Sidney Poitier - My Piece!
A Rolling Stone FOIA request (by me!) has unearthed the FBI’s files on the trailblazing actor and activist, who was targeted for a program that brought Obama’s father to America.
I’m proud to share this important reporting with you today about a great man! Here’s a breakdown of it for your convenience – please read and share the piece so the abuses of the FBI and our country get wider attention.
The FBI kept tabs on Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier through the use of informants and surveillance tactics. His file, with some portions newly declassified after my request, is just 13 pages long and is almost certainly incomplete. (for example, there are Sidney Poitier mentions in the Aretha Franklin FBI files).
The files focus primarily on Poitier's associations with civil rights leaders like MLK Jr., efforts to raise funds for underprivileged Black youth, support for integration, and support of the NAACP and the SCLC.
As part of this reporting, I was privileged to have an extended conversation with Oscar-winning actress Lee Grant, who was a friend to Poitier from early days in NYC. Grant had received an Oscar nomination for her very first movie role but then was blacklisted for 12 years by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for speaking out about the stress of the blacklist for a friend who was on it and passed away.
Lee Grant, who starred in "In the Heat of the Night" with Poitier and went on to do a documentary with him of his life, told me, "He didn't come from that place of having a foot put on your neck. He came from the beach. He came from a joyous place. He was Sid-nerella." She was speaking of his childhood, which is an amazing story (involving a soothsayer!).
Poitier lived in the Bahamas through age 15, when he was sent to Miami to live with his brother. After dealing with racism for the first time and catching the attention of the Ku Klux Klan for making a delivery to the front door instead of the back door of a white woman's home, Sidney set off for New York City, where he'd heard there was a Black community. Lee Grant told me, "He just broke the color barrier all by himself, not knowing it and not accepting it...it's like a Dickens story: you plop him down in another world, and he says, 'Fuck that, I'm going to the big city.'"
Poitier had to deal with many injustices early on, including having to sign a paper making him an indentured servant to the director of a film he worked on in South Africa. He and others back home found little opportunity for acting work and tried to petition the Actors' Equity Association. Poitier later said, "those of us who petitioned wound up being blacklisted. I was one of the young Black actors who became persona non grata, charged with being a troublemaker." In Grant's documentary, he later stated, "The law said, in America, you will be treated as less-than. I could never adjust to that. So, I became involved in the civil rights movement."
The FBI files collected on Sidney Poitier show a focus on his efforts to help youth from Kenya. One document from 1960 notes efforts by Poitier and Jackie Robinson to raise funds and give personal pledges for Kenyan students ... a program that would lead to Obama's presidency. More on that later ... The FBI document notes, "Jackie Robinson, former major league baseball player and Sidney Poitier, actor, are prominent American Negroes, who are outspoken advocates of racial equality."
Poitier biographer Aram Goudsouzian points out that the actor "helped fund the [Kenyan youth university scholarship] program along with Jackie Robinson and Harry Belafonte...Institutions like...the U.S. State Department feared that these students would stir anti-American sentiment and cause racial unrest. Fascinatingly, the program allowed for a Kenyan named Barack Obama to attend the University of Hawaii, where he met Ann Dunham In 1961, they sired the future president of the United States." In 2009, then-President Obama presented Poitier with the Congressional Medal of Freedom.
The FBI also took note of a D.C. screening of Sidney Poitier's Lilies of the Field, a movie he would go on to win the Oscar for Best Actor for. The screening was for the benefit of the NAACP, Congress for Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the SCLC. The FBI, for some reason, forwarded this information on to D.C. police.
The FBI did not respond to my multiple emails asking for comment (nor did they on my Aretha Franklin story). Retired FBI Special Agent Mike German (@RethinkIntel) noted, "These documents, which are clearly not the totality of FBI records referencing Sidney Poitier, highlight the extent to which J. Edgar Hoover's FBI monitored Black celebrities involved in social and racial justice issues. Hoover was an inveterate racist who considered any challenge to the existing white power structures as a threat to national security. Particularly, Hoover feared the rise of charismatic Black leaders who led the struggle for civil rights, and he directed his agents to monitor them and their organizations or, worse, to disrupt their lives with a toolbox full of dirty tricks. Anyone who has seen a Poitier film can confirm his charisma."
Interestingly, there's just one hint I was able to find that Poitier knew he was under the watch of the FBI ... but he had more than an inkling about the threat of being blacklisted in other ways. He was asked to sign loyalty oaths against the likes of actor Paul Robeson multiple times – which he declined to do. Poitier said, "I was definitely, by then, inclined toward left of center...I found more people like Phil Rose and David Susskind, people demonstrating a genuine willingness to receive me as an equal. That was reason enough, I suppose, for the FBI to keep an eye on me."
Powerfully, Poitier wrote of being asked to sign loyalty oaths, "It drove me wild that these men could see red but couldn't see Black... I was being accused of being sympathetic toward, respectful of, even admiring of Paul Robeson and Canada Lee – men I did respect tremendously!... Here I am in a culture that denies me of my personhood... this land once declared me to be three-fifths of a human being, and that only one hundred years earlier the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court had declared people of my race to be, 'so inferior, that they had no rights.'...every attempt I make to articulate myself as otherwise is met with resistance, and here this guy is saying to me, 'we want you to swear your loyalty.'...There's no way. He wants my soul.. this is not something that's for sale."
Of being blacklisted, there were different blacklists of the time. Longtime agent and friend of Poitier, Martin Baum, said, "I saw the evidence of the blacklist that he was on. His crime being that he was a roommate of Canada Lee – a man that I admired greatly and that he admired greatly."
Retired FBI Special Agent Mike German said of the Sidney Poitier FBI files, "Nothing in the files suggest a hint of illegality, violence, or sedition, and the FBI had no business tracking Poitier's First Amendment-protected activities with these groups, much less maintaining this material in its files. No American should ever have had to worry that a powerful government agency would monitor their non-violent political activism, or that it could secretly disrupt their lives without due process."
Civil rights and Hollywood Historian Emilie Raymond reminds us that "the FBI has a long track record of monitoring Americans for their supposed 'extremism.' But it's the FBI itself who is defining and interpreting extremism,' so almost anyone can be swept into the agency's radar."
"A new era of Black activist has come under scrutiny and the FBI has resurrected 'disruption' as a tactic. Sunlight is always the best disinfectant, so bringing these historical abuses to light is crucial to understanding how an agency with such an important mission as protecting the American people becomes a threat to them." ~ Retired FBI Special Agent Mike German
It was important for me to include that Sidney Poitier sometimes became frustrated with the press for solely focusing on race at the expense of everything else in his career and life. "You sit here and ask me such one-dimensional questions about a very tiny area of our lives. You ask me questions that fall continually within the Negro-ness of my life. You ask me questions that pertain to the narrow scope of the summer riots. I am artist, man, American, and contemporary. I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due and not simply ask me about those things."
This piece on the great Sidney Poitier comes before this year's March 12 Oscars– the Academy Awards, which have historically not given Black actors their due. Hattie McDaniel won in 1940 for her role as Mammy in Gone With The Wind. Another Black actor did not win until Poitier for his role as Homer Smith in Lilies of the Field 24 years later. Another Black woman did not win until Whoopi Goldberg won a half-century after McDaniel.
Actresses Viola Davis and Daniel Deadwyler have spoken out after being snubbed for the Oscars this year, following questions surrounding campaigning by supporters of a white actress. Davis said, "Whether it be a 'grassroots' campaign spearheaded by peers or multi-million industry dollars backing one, we rarely are the benefactors."
Hollywood has a way to go on equality, as does the country at large, but we have the legacy of the man who built a chapel for nuns in Lilies of the Field, showed America that love is love in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and slapped back with dignity in In the Heat of the Night to look to as a guiding light. Poitier broke down barriers he didn’t even know existed when he began his career. Lee Grant reminds us that Sidney Poitier, her dear friend, “Walked with kings, and he became one.” Please share the piece!
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Jenn
That was wonderful, Jenn, head to toe!
It is wild how the FBI kept tabs on so many public figures. Their files on Frank Sinatra are also crazy!