On this day in 1964, Sidney Poitier received the best actor Oscar for his role in Lilies of the Field, becoming the first black actor to win the top US award for acting
Poitier the pioneer
“It has been a long journey to this moment,” Poitier said after he was presented with the famous Oscar statuette by actress Ann Bancroft. “Much of America was scandalised by the chaste congratulatory peck on the cheek Bancroft gave Poitier when presenting his award,” according to the BBC
First on-screen interracial kiss
Poitier later was part of the first on-screen interracial kiss in the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, the BBC added. The film was among a number of hits he starred in during the late 1960s. Among the hits was In the Heat of the Night (1967) where he played Detective Virgil Tibbs
In the Heat of the Night
The 1967 film, one of Poitier’s best-remembered movies, showed the “hot surge of racial hate and prejudice” that was “so evident in so many places” in the US then, film critic Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times. “Here the corrosiveness of prejudice is manifested by a clutch of town police toward a Negro detective from the North who is picked up as a suspect in a white man’s murder,” he adds
Police chief Gillespie:
“Virgil”? That’s a funny name for a n***er boy to come from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?
Virgil Tibbs (Poitier’s character): They call me MISTER TIBBS!
In the Heat of the Night (1967) (No. 16 on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest movie quotes of all time)