I was born in the early 1980s, but I was much older when I first became aware of the major historical events that my parents lived through.
History became an obsession of mine by the time I reached my teenage years. I read at length about the American Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.
I immersed myself in topical fiction, music and movies.
While other kids of the 90s were watching Home Alone, my brother and I often raided the town’s five local movie stores in search of Sidney Poitier movies.
We watched as many as we could, including A Raisin in the Sun, The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and To Sir, With Love.
Poitier died last week at age 94.
He was one of the finest actors who ever graced a movie screen, evidenced by the fact that in 1963 he became the first African American actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
That was for Lilies of the Field.
The following summer after his Oscar win, the civil rights movement was heating up in Mississippi, with the launch of Freedom Summer.
Poitier’s lifelong friend, singer and actor Harry Belafonte, convinced Poitier (the story goes) to travel with him to the South to deliver tens of thousands of dollars that had been raised to support those volunteering to promote voter registration.
The pair brought about $70,000 to Greenwood.
Word got out that the two men were in the Delta, and according to Poitier’s recounting of the story, he and Belafonte were chased in their vehicles by whites.
This was the same summer that three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered near Philadelphia.
I did not learn about this story until much later in my adult life, but I had always assumed that Poitier fled Mississippi and lived with that impression of the state for the rest of his life.
I’m certain that experience emboldened Poitier to take on his more courageous roles in the mid-to-late-sixties, including In the Heat of the Night, Patch of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
That series shattered traditional Hollywood stereotypes about African Americans, but it also served to typecast the actor, who did not get very many good scripts between 1969 and 1989.
I was working on a draft for this column this week when my friend and former E-T Publisher Jim Abbott asked me to give him a call about a potential story idea.
When I caught up to Jim on Monday, he informed me that Poitier had not only returned to the Mississippi Delta, but he came right here to Indianola.
This was in 1994, three decades after his harrowing escape with Belafonte.
In fact, Belafonte came with him in ’94 as well.
It turns out that civil rights icon Bob Moses had launched a program called the Algebra Project, which was a new method for solving algebraic equations using real life applications.
Indianola was part of the pilot program.
About a year into it, Moses invited Poitier and Belafonte to come to Indianola to see his work in progress.
Abbott was kind enough to share a few of the photos from that day. They appear on Page 15.
I honestly don’t know how many times Poitier made it back to the Mississippi Delta between 1964 and 1994, but I was thrilled that he got to see another side of our region and something positive taking place in the classrooms.
He was able to meet fans, and perhaps make a few younger ones while he was here that week.
Outside the Silver Screen, Poitier was a man of few words, but he was also a courageous man of action.
He could have gone anywhere in the world he wanted at any time, but he chose to come to the Delta – at least twice - once in 1964 to help with Freedom Summer and again in 1994 to help provide a better educational foundation for local students.
