The Life and Legacy of Sidney Poitier

[0] From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro.

[1] This is a daily.

[2] Today.

[3] Against all odds, Sydney Poitier, the first black man to win an Academy Award, changed American cinema.

[4] But Wesley Morris, a culture critic at the Times, said it went further than that, that Poitier transformed America itself.

[5] It's Friday, January 14th.

[6] Honestly, when Sidney Poitier died, you sat down and you wrote an essay about him.

[7] And I wonder if you can read the opening words of that essay.

[8] One second, please.

[9] Okay.

[10] On January 7th, 2022, I, Wesley Morris, wrote, Were anyone to ask me, who's the greatest American movie star, my answer would never change.

[11] and it will never change because the answer is easy the greatest American movie star is Sidney Poitier you mean the greatest black movie star I don't am I being controversial confrontational contrarian no I'm simply telling the truth that's a big paragraph and it's a bold statement and you only get to utter a sentence like that once truly in the life of a critic you said that Sidney Poitay is the greatest American movie star period.

[12] It can't be anybody else.

[13] But listen, I don't think it's John Wayne.

[14] The case can be made.

[15] I don't think it's Carrie Grant.

[16] The case can be made.

[17] I don't think it's Marilyn Monroe.

[18] The case can be made.

[19] My case is for Sidney Poitier.

[20] And why is that?

[21] I can't think of another person who had to mean more, to do more, just to be taken seriously in a movie in the first place.

[22] You know, he was working in a hole where other actors were at sea level.

[23] So there's that.

[24] There's also the fact that, you know, he was asked to do a very specific thing over and over and over again.

[25] Which is?

[26] He was changing the way people saw a people who for 120 years at that point in the 1950s were only looking at black people one way.

[27] They had not been trained to see a black person be physically equal in stature in a movie to a white man. They hadn't seen a black man share uncontested space with a white woman.

[28] They hadn't seen a black man do anything professional that required training and skill and schooling.

[29] until he showed up.

[30] So, Wesley, walk us through the story of how Sidney Poitier came to be this thing, in your words, the greatest American movie star.

[31] Where does that story start?

[32] It starts about as far away from the movies as you could possibly get.

[33] Cat Island was like a garden.

[34] Fruit grew on trees while.

[35] He grew up in the Bahamas.

[36] My father was a tomato farmer.

[37] His father, Reginald, and his mother Evelyn grew and sold tomatoes.

[38] And they struggled.

[39] They were poor and had a hard time making ends meet.

[40] And there was a lot of need.

[41] We're talking about a large family.

[42] And Sidney was getting into trouble.

[43] And his father sees all this and decides that it just might make more sense to lighten the family's load to ship him somewhere else.

[44] And that's somewhere else is where his brother, Cyril, lives with his family in Miami.

[45] Mm -hmm.

[46] I didn't spend the first 15 years of my life cringing in the presence of white people.

[47] And just to make it super clear, so we understand what the Bahamas actually is, it is a black country.

[48] So I grew up those 15 years.

[49] I was within the circumference of the black community constantly.

[50] So you would be seeing as a black person, black people doing everything.

[51] It was an environment that nurtured me in ways that I wasn't even aware of, so that I got to 15, not afraid of white people.

[52] So to come to the U .S. and to suddenly, everywhere you go, your blackness, the thing that was sort of nondescript and unremarkable, where you grew up, is suddenly a cause for alarm, a target for abuse?

[53] And frankly, to you, if you're Sydney Poitier, a complete and total mystery.

[54] Like, what is going on here?

[55] And what did that look like?

[56] I hated Florida.

[57] I hated Florida.

[58] I hated it because it was an unfair place.

[59] Well, it looked like segregation.

[60] It looked like classic Jim Crow nonsense.

[61] And so he decides that he is going to go as far away from that as he possibly can.

[62] And as far away as he could deduce at that time.

[63] was New York City.

[64] I was in New York.

[65] I had three bucks.

[66] I had no friends, no family, no relations, no addresses.

[67] I knew no one.

[68] I got off at the bus station of 50th Street and 8th Avenue.

[69] I'm walking up and down Broadway.

[70] I am absolutely, I am transfixed by the lights and the traffic and the people.

[71] It's incredible.

[72] Absolutely.

[73] So he comes here, has this dream of living in Harlem and having this great life.

[74] And he doesn't have a great life.

[75] He's essentially homeless, sleeping on a bench, arrested for vagrancy.

[76] You know, he does a stint in the army, hates it, leaves, gets back to New York.

[77] And one day, he's scanning the Amsterdam News, the great black Harlem publication.

[78] And there's an ad for auditions at the American Negro Theater.

[79] And he decides he's going to show up to read.

[80] even though he knows he's not the best reader at this point.

[81] He's only had a little bit of schooling.

[82] He said, oh, he said, you're an actor?

[83] I said, yes, of course.

[84] He said, okay.

[85] He said, here.

[86] He gave me a script.

[87] First time I had seen such a thing.

[88] And I started to read like this.

[89] So I want you to...

[90] That's about as far as I got.

[91] And he has shown the door by this man. and on the way out of the door, the man basically tells him, no, this will never do.

[92] You don't have a future here.

[93] No, sir.

[94] Bye.

[95] And as he tossed me out, he said something that changed my whole life.

[96] He said, stop wasting people's time.

[97] Why don't you go out and get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something?

[98] And Poitier is like, excuse me, I didn't come here to wash dishes I didn't come here for any of that I came here to learn how to act to join this acting group and you're telling me that all I'm qualified to do is wash dishes By the time I reached the corner I had resolved that I would become an actor only to prove to him that I was not just destined to be at this one.

[99] I mean, he became an actor out of personal offense.

[100] It was not a dream.

[101] It wasn't an ambition.

[102] It was to prove somebody wrong.

[103] I think he wanted to prove that he was more than this country at this point in his life was telling him he could be.

[104] So, ironically, he decides that he is going to go back to the American Negro Theater and propose something.

[105] and what he proposes is that he is going to basically be the maintenance guy for them if they let him watch the acting lessons and watch the productions and he gets an education in how to carry himself, how to interpret lines, how to stand on stage, how to take direction, and he works really hard to lose his West Indian accent, listens to a lot of radio to lose it and that beautiful what i would still say is just like a beautifully melodic speaking voice is born and he learns to speak a kind of american entertainment english and he really begins to understand that he he just knows what he does not want to be doing if he does get an opportunity to do something greater explain that I mean, none of the actors who know black actor during this period is like, you know what I really want to do, I want to carry Jane Wyman's bags.

[106] That's what I want to do.

[107] But I think that never taking a job, an acting job, where that is what you do, is a totally different thing.

[108] And there are lots of actors who didn't do that as well, and they didn't work.

[109] And he is lucky enough and talented enough.

[110] I mean, you need both those things to make this Sydney Poitier...

[111] adventure happened in the first place, he starts getting parts that aren't the usual parts black actors are even asked to play.

[112] Don't touch the dressings, I'll do that myself.

[113] All right, doctor.

[114] Thank you.

[115] One of them's a doctor in a movie called No Way Out from 1950.

[116] He plays a priest and cry the beloved country that adaptation of that Alan Patton classic.

[117] Hey, Miller.

[118] Come on, I want to talk to you a minute, Miller.

[119] And then in 1955, he plays a student in this film called the Blackboard jungle where these teenage boys are just essentially terrorists at this high school and he's recruited to reform the bad boys.

[120] You know that you're a little brighter a little smarter than the rest of those guys.

[121] Right?

[122] Yeah.

[123] So in all three of these movies he is essentially this exceptional Negro.

[124] And a lot of his career, two major lanes of his career are taken up with doctor parts and educator parts and I don't think that's an accident I think that his assignment his mandate is essentially to heal and educate and anybody who comes to see him is essentially being healed in some ways or treated for their blindness to the humanity of black people and educated about what all black people can be and do and that is a huge shift from the way things were happening before Sydney Poitier got to the movies.

[125] Right.

[126] And it's not easy to undo 120 years of racist images of black people, as servile, as stupid, as hopelessly happy to be enslaved.

[127] Mm -hmm.

[128] It's impossible to undo.

[129] We have not undone it.

[130] But when Sidney Poitier shows up, It is a seismic shift away from what had previously been happening in the movies before he got there.

[131] He wasn't the first person to try to do it.

[132] But the parts weren't as insulting now.

[133] And when you're a movie star, you can do a lot with a little.

[134] And nobody did more with less, I would say, in the history of American stardom in the Sydney Pottier.

[135] Well, see, I wonder if you can walk us through a particular performance in this early phase of his career, where he embodies this.

[136] idea you're describing of the very difficult work of undoing decades of perceptions of blackness and what it's supposed to look like on screen and being so very talented at doing it.

[137] You're tired, ain't you, baby?

[138] You owe so tired of everything.

[139] Me, the boy, the way we live in this beat -up whole...

[140] I mean, a raisin in the sun.

[141] I mean, you couldn't be on my side that long for nothing.

[142] A raise it in the sun.

[143] Underrated movie, one of the first great works of American theater that is also written by a black person, in this case, Lurie.

[144] and when we're thinking about this idea of Sidney Poitier undoing so much screen history, so much entertainment history with respect to black people, the thing about this performance and this part is that he is playing a driver and the thing that's amazing about it is you never really see him doing his job.

[145] Ordinarily, what you'd be watching is a person just driving around white people, you would never do the thing that this movie does, which is enter his home.

[146] I'm looking in the mirror this morning.

[147] I'm thinking I'm 35 years old.

[148] I'm married 11 years, and I got a boy who's got to sleep in the living room because I got nothing, hey?

[149] I mean, Michael, just to give you a sense of how bad things were for black people on screens and on stages by 1961.

[150] Damn, these eggs.

[151] This is a revolutionary.

[152] act, sitting in the home that a black woman created for black characters to sit and talking.

[153] To show the fullness of a black character in his home environment.

[154] Well, I mean, when you put it that way, it sounds intentionally political.

[155] And obviously, in 1961, it would have been.

[156] But just think about the fact that, like, this is a human being wanting to write about human beings.

[157] And where do human beings live?

[158] In a house.

[159] A man say there's woman, I got me a dream.

[160] She says, eat your eggs.

[161] They're getting cold.

[162] I tell you, I got to change my life because I'm choking a death.

[163] And all you say to me is eat these eggs.

[164] And so the movie is about a family in Chicago living in a little apartment.

[165] There are five of them.

[166] And they inherit $10 ,000.

[167] And the question, the central drama is, how do we spend this money?

[168] The mother, Lena Younger, wants to use the money to buy.

[169] a house in a better neighborhood that is also white.

[170] And one of the tensions that comes up is that, you know, they move to buy this house and the neighborhood, Clyburn Park in Chicago, they dispatch a neighborhood improvement association representative to essentially buy them out of the house to just like say, please don't do this.

[171] Don't move to this neighborhood.

[172] And the mother says, we shouldn't take this money.

[173] This is racist money.

[174] we shouldn't, this is beneath us.

[175] And the son, Walter, is played by Sidney Poitier, says, He who takes the most is the smartest.

[176] Absolutely, we should take this money.

[177] Some awful pain inside me. Don't cry, just understand.

[178] Now, that white man is going to walk in that door, able to write checks for more money than we ever had.

[179] It's that important to him, and we're going to help him.

[180] We're going to put on the show.

[181] The speech that he gives and the way he delivers it with, you know, his arms and, I mean, he is using his whole body I didn't make this world It was handed to me Exactly like it is Yes I want some yacht someday What's wrong with that And I want to put some pearls on my wife's neck You tell me what man decides in this world What woman should wear pearls And what woman shouldn't I tell you I'm a man I say I want her to wear it There's something about all of this anger And Threatened hope that he feels coming off of him You want to keep it that way you get got a right to keep it that way.

[182] Just give me that money, and the house is yours, and I'll feel fine, fine.

[183] The burning intensity and the swings between, like, alacrity and shame are so vivid.

[184] Maybe I'll get down on my black knees.

[185] All right, Mr. Charlie.

[186] All right, Mr. Great White Father, you just give us that money, and we won't come out there and dirty up your white folks' neighborhood.

[187] And I'll feel fine.

[188] I find it meaningful that Raisin in the Sun begins the 1960s because the 60s is a new era of black self -expression and at the center of that is Sidney Poitier.

[189] And he only got more popular as the decade went on.

[190] He wins the Oscar in 64.

[191] He has massive hits after that.

[192] And so a kind of genius of Sidney Poitier as a movie, movie star is that he was able to calibrate his persona with the gains of the civil rights movement when the movement succeeded he succeeded and when he succeeded it made the movement seem like it was more likely to succeed you know he was the Hollywood division of the civil rights movement and as the movement is changing and getting angrier so is he and in 1967 he is going to challenge white people like they have never been challenged by a black man before.

[193] We'll be right back.

[194] Wesley, you said that in 1967, Poité really begins to challenge white America in the films that he acts in.

[195] So tell us about that.

[196] Well, I mean, he had the best 1967 of anybody in Hollywood.

[197] He was the biggest draw that year, and two of the movies he had in 67 were landmarks of Hollywood storytelling in a lot of ways.

[198] In the heat...

[199] Let's start within the heat of the day.

[200] You're pretty sure of yourself, ain't you, Virgil?

[201] Sidney Poitier plays...

[202] They call me Mr. Tibbs.

[203] Detective Virgil Tibbs.

[204] The best detective Philadelphia has.

[205] Well, Mr. Wood, take Mr. Tibbs.

[206] Take him down.

[207] He's in the South, visiting his mother, and gets pulled into a murder investigation alongside this racist police chief, who's played by Rod Steiger in the movie.

[208] And Virgil is doing some sniffing around, and he finds an exotic plant or an unusual plant that is in the murder victim's car.

[209] And Tibbs has a hunch that leads them to the home of a cotton magnet whose name is Endicott.

[210] Oh, is Mr. Endicott here?

[211] Yes, sir.

[212] He's out in the greenhouse.

[213] Would you follow me, please?

[214] So they're led around to his greenhouse where he's tending some plants.

[215] And Tibbs begins to ask him about, the plants.

[216] What do you call this material?

[217] That's Osmondon.

[218] Fernroot.

[219] And he notices that the plant that he found in the car is indeed in the pot of the orchids that Endicott has in his greenhouse.

[220] So...

[221] Why'd you two come here?

[222] Endicott's kind of intrigued about what this line of questioning is all about.

[223] Like, what are you guys here to accuse me of?

[224] You were saying that I was mixed up in this sordid business of this murder?

[225] You two came here.

[226] Here, to question me. And Tibbs is like, some people, well, let us say the people who work for Mr. Colbert might reasonably regard you as the person least likely to mourn his passing.

[227] We were just trying to clarify.

[228] Wouldn't it begin your interest?

[229] Wasn't the murder victim in your greenhouse the night he died?

[230] That's just too much for Endicott.

[231] Was Mr. Colbert ever in this greenhouse, say last night, about midnight?

[232] And he walks over, and he says, slaps Virgil Tibbs.

[233] And I think in a normal Sydney Pardier movie, you just kind of expect him to stand there and take it.

[234] But that's not what happens.

[235] Sydney Pardy is slapped by this white man. And rather than stand there and take it, he slaps him right back.

[236] Just instantly.

[237] Like, it's, it is a physics response.

[238] It is the most automatic thing, he doesn't think about it, he gets slapped, his hand just flies across this man's face.

[239] The automatic response is the thing that's so thrilling about it, because you don't see it coming for any number of reasons, because it's just not done.

[240] It's not done in the movies, and it's not done in life.

[241] And the fact that Sidney Partier does it, and he's mad.

[242] And there's something about his fury that just like, even talking about it to you right now, my blood pressure is up.

[243] It's just I wasn't alive in 1967 but I have people in my family who talk about this slap like it was an earthquake that they were present for you know it was it was something that they never forgot because they had never seen it before so in this moment it feels like a shift has just occurred right Sydney Poit is not doing the work of undoing past representations of what it means to be a black person in film, he's moved beyond that by slapping this white man. He's literally physically confronting white racism.

[244] He's not just trying to reverse perceptions of blackness.

[245] Well, I mean, he's kind of doing both, right?

[246] The thing about this slap is, it wasn't in the script.

[247] Sidney Poitier...

[248] had to advocate for the slap in this movie.

[249] And the physics of the slap was amazing.

[250] The sort of racial physics was amazing because this moment, this slap, is a reversal for everything that had happened to a black person previously in the movies.

[251] The attempted lynchings, the actual lynchings.

[252] You know, the lynching of the black image through black face minstrelsy, for instance.

[253] The idea that none of those black actors ever got to retaliate for their treatment in movies, And I think that the violence of it really spoke to where the civil rights movement appeared to be headed, not toward actual violence in that way.

[254] But, you know, it was the movement was making a turn into the realization that peaceable, you know, pacifist protest might not be cutting it.

[255] And so there is this turning point in the civil rights movement that this slap is really connecting with you know cities are burning at this point you know right america is on fire like responding to the neglect that this country has subjected black people to and this one gesture by one of the most famous black people on earth let alone this country is such a recognition an encapsulation of a rage that is already expressing itself in american cities.

[256] And here it is in a movie theater, in one second of movie making.

[257] Okay, and what about the other film that you mentioned?

[258] How does that end up confronting white America in new and uncomfortable ways?

[259] Well, essentially, I mean, it's called guess who's coming to dinner, so you know who's coming to dinner.

[260] It's Sidney Poitier.

[261] So, fasten your seatbelts, people.

[262] Mrs. Drayton, I'm medically qualified, so I hope you wouldn't think it presumptuous if I say you ought to sit down before you fall down, I mean.

[263] He thinks she's going to faint because he's a Negro.

[264] Well, I don't think I'm going to faint.

[265] But I'll sit down anyway.

[266] And essentially, the movie is about Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy who play the parents of the white woman who was bringing Sydney Poitier home and the decision they have to make about whether to ratify this marriage.

[267] And just how unusual would an interracial marriage be in the year 1967.

[268] I mean, a legal one?

[269] Unusual.

[270] Rare.

[271] I mean, this is the year of Loving v. Virginia, right?

[272] This is the Supreme Court decision that makes interracial marriage legal.

[273] Yes, yes.

[274] And so the idea that you'd be watching a Hollywood movie with Hollywood royalty in Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy sitting here debating the rightness or wrong, of this marriage liberal white people right it's not like she took him home to mississippi she goes to san francisco which is the exact opposite in theory and so that's the challenge here to a particular kind of moviegoer a white moviegoer in 1967 it's how tolerant are you really how tolerant are you of sidney potier would you want this man to be part of your family so the movie does some things to make that a little easy it you know makes him a widower He had a wife and child.

[275] He lost them.

[276] So you feel sympathy for him there.

[277] Right.

[278] And he's perfect.

[279] Education, like, socioeconomically, he's perfect.

[280] He's a doctor, saving people.

[281] He, you know, what parent could object?

[282] Or if you are a parent who does object, you really will be exposed as being a terrible person because the only thing wrong with this man is that he's black.

[283] So that's on you if you can't approve this marriage.

[284] Sorry.

[285] But the movie does this weird thing that, you know, feels to me as a different slap in the face.

[286] And that is the way that it offloads a lot of its misgivings about the relationship to black people.

[287] All the tension is between the black characters in this movie.

[288] Son, you've got to listen to me. Now, I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life.

[289] But you've got to stop and think.

[290] And I think a scene that really illustrates this disrespect and misunderstanding, I would say, is a scene between Sidney Poitier and the actor who plays his father in this movie, Roy E. Glenn.

[291] Have you thought what people would say about you?

[292] Why, in 16 or 17 states, you'd be breaking the law.

[293] You'd be criminals.

[294] And say they'd change the law.

[295] That don't change the way people feel about this thing.

[296] And the father is expressing some misgivings about this being a poor choice for him and, like, he's concerned for his health and safety and welfare.

[297] And then...

[298] But you don't own me. You can't tell me when or where I'm out of line or try to get me to live my life according to your rules.

[299] Sidney Pardier, in one of his finest acting moments, drops a nuclear megaton bomb on his dad of all people.

[300] You are 30 years older than I am.

[301] You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be.

[302] And not until your whole generation has lain down and died.

[303] Will the dead weight of you be off our backs?

[304] You understand you've got to get off my back?

[305] It's great acting.

[306] But it's kind of a sad commentary on what the screenwriters think the real problem in the movie is.

[307] You mean, it's kind of misdirected to.

[308] put all the tension and all the burden on a black family when we all know this is about whether white people can accept a black son -in -law.

[309] Yes.

[310] Yes.

[311] Ding, ding, ding.

[312] It's a ludicrous scene.

[313] And the thing that makes it extra ludicrous is the fact that no black son would ever say this in the 1960s.

[314] No 40 -year -old black son is going to speak this way to his 60 -something probably father.

[315] None.

[316] Zero.

[317] Not at all.

[318] Never.

[319] This, to me, is some James Dean stuff that the white screenwriters decided was the thing that people would just say.

[320] This is our stab at equality.

[321] Having black people say stuff that white people would say.

[322] Okay, so don't leave a, don't leave us hanging.

[323] What is the decision?

[324] Oh, they're getting married.

[325] They're getting married.

[326] Dun dun -da -da -da -da -dun.

[327] And it ends with that.

[328] the actual dinner.

[329] It ends with a meal.

[330] So, you know, welcome to Hollywood.

[331] So how does the public react to these two groundbreaking films, these two very different kinds of slaps in the face?

[332] With a knife and a fork.

[333] They eat it up.

[334] They love it.

[335] Both movies are nominated for Best Picture.

[336] In the heat of the night, wins Best Picture.

[337] But Sidney Partier's 1967, you know, especially in the form of these two movies, do cement an argument that people have been having amongst themselves, especially black people, about what advancement looks like, what it should look like for black people in entertainment.

[338] And so along these lines, there is a famous piece from 1967 written by a man named Clifford Mason that ran in the New York Times on a Sunday when everybody's looking for an ideas piece that like really kind of explains their week to them explains the culture right and the piece is called White is White America loves Sydney Poitier so and in it Clifford Mason proceeds to critique Sydney Poitiers function in the movies as a black person and one of his conclusions is that you know for so long Sidney Prowdy had basically been this chaste figure, right?

[339] He wasn't really, he wasn't doing enough slapping, right?

[340] He wasn't doing enough confronting of the white people around him.

[341] He was tolerating a lot.

[342] And it wasn't good enough that his mere presence was a civil rights act.

[343] Undoing wasn't enough for this man. No. He wanted more doing and less undoing.

[344] So it seems to Clifford Mason, and I am deliberately being provocative here, Sidney Poitie was not the greatest American actor.

[345] You know what, Michael?

[346] Stop doing your job.

[347] I don't think he's saying that.

[348] I actually think that he, in writing that piece, it's an acknowledgment that Sidney Poitier was.

[349] Interesting.

[350] He's taking aim at the greatest movie star in Hollywood to say that this person is also black and his greatness as a movie star is kind of deserving black people and flattering white people to a degree that he Clifford Mason finds harmful and that there's a cost to this person being the greatest living movie star and the cost is to other black people but this piece is written as though he was running Warner Bros. This piece was written as though he was at the head of Paramount Pictures.

[351] He did the most he could do, do with what he had.

[352] He made the most with the least.

[353] And I don't know what Mason would have preferred happen, which would there be no Sidney Poitier, but it wasn't like he had the ability or the power to have made a movie himself.

[354] Right.

[355] Which is why in 2021, you know, I'm grateful that we have the Jordan Peel and Barry Jenkins and Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay and D. Rees.

[356] I mean, that was impossible in 1960, whatever.

[357] There was no black screen life before Sidney Poitier, no true black screen life.

[358] And he showed that it was possible for a black person to be on screen and be alive and feeling and responsive and loving and educated and humane and dapper and handsome, handsome, handsome.

[359] He was proof of a lie this country's culture had been telling on black people for the entire time we've had an American popular culture.

[360] And so the idea that he can undo all this stuff and like still leave some stuff left for other people to undo is really okay.

[361] He can't do it alone.

[362] He himself was a movement, but you can't truly be a movement of what.

[363] And he knew that, which is why he spent the rest of his career after 1967, getting to where he had always been trying to go when he was isolated from black people, which essentially, as far as I'm concerned, was home to other black people, other black artists.

[364] I mean, it even sort of makes it easier for a person like Denzo Washington or a person like Wilson.

[365] Smith or a person like Viola Davis or a person like Whoopi Goldberg to have the careers they have they're not complication free but they certainly aren't as burdened in the way that Poitiers' career was a burden because he went first you know he went first and showed people that it could be done and he gave people hope that they could do it too so is that his legacy that he paved the way for so many of the big names that you just mentioned.

[366] Yeah, sure.

[367] That's his legacy.

[368] But he also, you know, I'm part of his legacy.

[369] I, Wesley Morris, you know, Negro sitting in the New York Times is part of Sidney Poitier's legacy.

[370] I'm not possible if he didn't happen.

[371] I understood that the Elon that he had, the charisma that he had, that was a thing that, like, I wanted to express, too.

[372] And I didn't want to be ashamed or afraid to express it.

[373] So, I mean, his legacy is so much wider and deeper than art itself.

[374] It is life.

[375] It is humanity.

[376] He was the first great mass -produced black human being the world had ever seen.

[377] That's a legacy that goes so far beyond a screen and a movie theater.

[378] I mean, that is living in every black person in this country.

[379] That is living in every black person on this planet who is aware of him and even people who are not.

[380] That is living in every white person in this country.

[381] It's living in every person, period.

[382] Whether they're aware of it or not, like this man has managed to affect what we see, how we relate to people, who we think we are, who we should aspire to be.

[383] And if that's not a sign of absolute greatness, I don't know what is.

[384] And it's all because Because he went and decided that he wasn't going to wash dishes when that man told him to.

[385] Well, Wesley, thank you very, very much.

[386] We appreciate it.

[387] Oh, man, Michael, thank you.

[388] I appreciate it, too.

[389] We'll be right back.

[390] Here's what else you need to another day.

[391] On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected President Biden's mandate that employees at large companies be either vaccinated or regularly tested for COVID.

[392] The ruling undercuts a centerpiece of the president's plan to limit the spread of the virus.

[393] In a 6 to 3 ruling, the court's conservative justices found that the mandate, which would have affected 80 million workers, exceeded the president's legal authority.

[394] But in a separate ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a narrower vaccine mandate from the Biden administration.

[395] That mandate requires the vaccination of 10 million.

[396] health care workers at facilities that receive federal money.

[397] Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Daniel Gimett, Ricky Novetsky, Muj Zady, and Robert Jimison, with help from Alexander Lee Young and Eric Kruppke.

[398] It was edited by Larissa Anderson and John Ketchum, contains original music by Marion Lazzano, and engineered by Brad Fisher.

[399] Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Land.

[400] of Wunderly.

[401] That's it for the Daily.

[402] I'm Michael Barrow.

[403] See you on Tuesday after the holiday.