Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris Page B

would be skipping the ceremony and pulling for Poitier to win. And even the part of the Hollywood establishment that still had one foot planted firmly in the era of red-baiting saw a chance, as columnist Sidney Skolsky wrote, “to telegraph to the globe that WE do not discriminate and thus give the lie to our so-called Communist friends.” 23
    Poitier knew that was nonsense. He was well aware that, as much as the sight of a black man holding an Oscar statuette for the first time might move many black and white Americans, his win would be used to sell a preposterous falsehood, the spurious notion that the movie industry had solved its own race problem and was now pointing the way for the rest of America. “Did I say to myself, ‘This country is waking up and beginning to recognize that certain changes are inevitable?’” he wrote, recalling the evening. “No, I did not. I knew that we hadn’t ‘overcome,’ because I was still the only one.” 24
    Nonetheless, when Anne Bancroft, who had won the Best Actress Oscar a year earlier for The Miracle Worker , took the stage, announced the nominees, opened the envelope, and, beaming, spoke Poitier’s name, he strode to the podium with genuine excitement, telling the cheering audience, “It has been a long journey to this moment.”
    That much, at least, was true. Lilies of the Field was the thirty-six-year-old actor’s nineteenth movie. Poitier was a native of the Bahamas who grew up in poverty; he moved to Miami as a teenager, then to New York, where he scraped by working in blue-collar service jobs and living in small rented rooms before he turned to acting. Poitier began his career as an immigrant who could barely read, an outsider wherever he found himself; the growing music and theater scene in Harlem in the late 1940s, and the indigenous black American experience from which it grew, felt and sounded, at first, as foreign to him as everything else in America. (He taught himself diction and grammar by listening to a white man on the radio.) He made his movie debut playing a doctor in Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 urban melodrama No Way Out. The film established a template for Poitier’s roles that was to provide him steady, if creatively constricting, employment for the next fifteen years: The character was a young professional surrounded by white bigots, a so-called credit to his race who achieved what white America was comfortable labeling “dignity” by at once demonstrating that he could feel anger and proving he was evolved enough to restrain himself from expressing it. Eventually, white characters in many of his movies would come to understand his finer qualities, meaning they would learn that he was exceptional and should therefore not be the target of prejudice: Often, for the sake of an imagined evenhandedness that made the films more palatable to white moviegoers, Poitier’s character had to learn a lesson, too, usually something about the perils of being too proud or suspicious to accept a helping hand.
    Poitier worked steadily after No Way Out: He was handsome, and his Roman-coin features made him castable across a broad age range (five years after playing a doctor, he played a high school student in The Blackboard Jungle , the film that really ignited his career). And he had no competition, since in the 1950s the movie industry had room for exactly one black actor (Belafonte, who acted once in a while, was really more of a recording star). Hollywood needed an “Exceptional Negro” in the 1950s, and Poitier was perfect in the role. Aside from his talent and magnetism, he demonstrated a remarkable instinct for self-presentation; without anyone to emulate, he knew exactly how much he could say publicly without jeopardizing his status in either black or white America. In the press, he walked a fine line almost unerringly: He was humble but never servile, concerned but rarely intemperate,