Few people realize that Academy Award-winning actor Sidney Poitier, who died Friday at 94, was born in Miami.
Miami is also where the actor, who broke endless racial boundaries through his art, first encountered deep racism as a teen. An incident in the city with the hate group the Ku Klux Klan changed his life.
The story goes that Poitier was born prematurely in Miami when his parents, who were farmers from The Bahamas, came to the city to sell produce raised on their small tomato farm. His mother went into labor two months early. Poitier was born, and the family eventually returned home.
Years later as a teenager, Poitier moved to Miami to live with an older brother. As he related to Oprah Winfrey and in speaking engagements, the young Poitier worked menial jobs. One day, he said, he was asked to deliver a package to a fancy home. Instead of leaving the package at the back door, as was demanded of Blacks, he knocked on the front door. In the 1940s South, that was a capital offense for a Black man, but Poitier, being from The Bahamas, was not fully aware of the consequences. Of course, we like to think that maybe he did it on purpose, and he was already fighting racism in his own way.
The homeowner reported Poitier’s transgression to the local KKK chapter. When he and his brother learned he was wanted by the KKK, who were looking for him to teach him a lesson, Poitier’s brother put his younger brother on a bus to New York.
Not long after he arrived in the Big Apple, Poitier was jailed for vagrancy and lived briefly in an orphanage. He later lied about his age and joined the U.S. Army, where he served with the 1267th Medical Detachment before being discharged.
Returning to New York, he worked at a series of dead-end jobs until he answered a newspaper ad for actors placed by the American Negro Theater. And the rest, as they say, is history.
That incident in Miami was likely paramount in forming the Poitier who became not just a Hollywood trailblazer who paved the way for generations of Black film stars, but also a vocal activist in the Civil Rights movement.
But that Miami helped teach him what racism looks like is nothing we should be proud of.
