“Please allow me to divert my gaze for one day away from our national political darkness and toward two national rays of light.
Monday is Sidney Poitier’s 90th birthday. His best friend of 70 years, Harry Belafonte, turns 90 on March 1.This is an ode to and appreciation of the friendship — one of the most remarkable and resilient of our time — between two Hollywood royals.Poitier and Belafonte didn’t meet until they were 20 years old, and yet Belafonte still considered Poitier his first real friend in life. As Belafonte put it, he lived a “nomadic” life as a child, shuttling back and forth between New York and islands of the Caribbean with his mother as she searched for work. “I did not get rooted long enough to develop what many people have the joy of experiencing, and that is childhood friends.” ”
Lillies of the Field is one of my favorite movies of all time.
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Socrates
is a trusted commenter Verona NJ 1 day ago
“I have always been a learner because I knew nothing.”
– Sidney Poitier
“I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was… a human being.”
– Sidney Poitier
“I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger: it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage–self destructive, destroy the world rage–and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.”
― Sidney Poitier
“Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.”
– Harry Belafonte
” You can cage the singer but not the song.”
– Harry Belafonte
“Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s anchor. We are the compass for humanity’s conscience.”
– Harry Belafonte
“I just want to say how much we are indebted to my dear and abiding friend, Harry Belafonte, and to all the distinguished and famous artists and entertainers who have taken the time out from their prestigious schedules to be with us here in Montgomery, Alabama, as we march on the state capital tomorrow morning. I know that our thanks will go out to them and will abide them for years to come.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965
America is a much richer place with our soul brothers than without them.
And we shall always overcome the milky white darkness that continues to stain our great country.
soxared, 04-07-13
Crete, Illinois 1 day ago
I could scarcely get through your column, Mr. Blow, with my emotions intact.
I am a generation younger than both nonagenarians yet it seems that I have known them all my life. When listening to his great “Live at Carnegie Hall” in 1959, I thought that Harry Belafonte had achieved the impossible: he had broken through white America’s doubt and resistance and reluctance to accept the talent of people of color. He left his audience(s) mesmerized, entertained, enthralled. And never in his life did the great singer play the “shame” card; that was something that people carried with them and it wasn’t his problem. The outrage was always there (“Darlin’ Cora,” “Cotton Fields,” “John Henry”) but he never leveraged it as a guilt trip, a pettiness that would have undercut the innate nobility that described him.
Sidney Poitier achieved what Jackie Robinson did on the baseball field but with a far wider audience. Not everyone listened to baseball games in the 1940’s and 1950’s but everybody went to the movies. From his seminal role as Noah Cullen, shackled to Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones,” to his professional pinnacle as the itinerant Homer Smith in “Lilies of the Field,” Mr. Poitier was the cultural model for African-Americans my age (19 in 1963), cool; watchful. The shock of his Oscar remains, for neither I nor countless others expected an entrenched Hollywood to step out of its racist character and acknowledge his talent.
Gentlemen, well done, both! And God’s blessings upon you.
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