How Sidney Poitier Got His Start In Harlem

HARLEM, NY — Years before Sidney Poitier became Sidney Poitier, he was a teenager living in Harlem — directionless and broke, but angling for an opportunity.

Poitier, the groundbreaking actor whose gravitas won him plaudits in films like "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" and "In The Heat of the Night," died Friday at age 94 in the Bahamas, where he spent much of his childhood.

After a few teenage years in Miami, the 16-year-old Poitier was scrubbing floors and peeling potatoes at a rural hotel near Atlanta in 1943, when he became restless.

After paying $11 for a bus ticket, Poitier arrived that year in New York City — but his real destination was Harlem, which had "enticed Sidney since childhood," and which was just a few years removed from the peak of its Renaissance, Aram Goudsouzian wrote in his 2004 biography of Poitier.

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Getting off the bus in Midtown, Poitier caught the A train and got off at 116th Street — though he ultimately returned downtown later that day after discovering that a Harlem hotel cost $3 per night, more than he could afford.

Ultimately, Poitier saved enough to rent a room on 127th Street, where he paid $5 per week while working as a dishwasher at restaurants and hotels around Manhattan.

"The tiny space contained only a small cot, a rickety bureau, and a nacked light bulb hanging off-center," Goudsouzian wrote.

Poitier's tenure in Harlem coincided with the August 1943 race riots, which were touched off when a white police officer shot and wounded a Black soldier in the lobby of the Braddock Hotel on 126th Street. In the biography, Poitier recalled playing dead inside a department store to avoid being targeted by the police, then being shot in the leg as he ran up Lenox Avenue and down 127th Street toward his apartment.

Discouraged by the New York City winter, Poitier joined the Army later that year, though he returned to Harlem after quitting. It was here that he made a fateful discovery one day while reading the Amsterdam News: the American Negro Theater had placed an advertisement seeking actors.

"Out of part dissatisfaction with the drudgery of daily toil, part fanciful daydream of a better life, and part sheer restlessness, Poitier pursued the following ad: 'Actors Wanted By Little Theatre Group; Apply in Person at the American Negro Theater,'" Goudsouzian wrote.

The storied theater group, based out of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, existed for less than a decade but is remembered for launching the careers of both Poitier and Harry Belafonte. He could barely read, had no exposure to plays, and read his lines with a thick Caribbean accent — prompting the director to show him out.

"As I walked to the bus, what humiliated me was the suggestion that all he could see in me was a dishwasher," Poitier later told the Associated Press. "If I submitted to him, I would be aiding him in making that perception a prophetic one."

So he returned to the theater, struck a deal to work as a janitor in exchange for acting lessons, and began plodding through the work. He landed a big break when a Broadway producer caught one of his performances and cast him in an all-Black production of “Lysistrata," the AP reported.

Poitier made his film debut in 1950's "No Way Out" — followed not long after by iconic roles in "Porgy and Bess" and "A Raisin In The Sun," advocacy in the civil rights movement, and seven ensuing decades of stardom.

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