This week US President Barack Obama bestowed the National Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honour, to a host of prominent Americans including the iconic black actor Sidney Poitier. Poitier broke barriers by becoming the first black actor ever to be awarded an Oscar. The National Medal of Freedom is a great honour for anyone. But Poitier is only one of a handful of people from the British West Indies to be acknowledged in this way.

Although Poitier is known as a Hollywood superstar, he was born and raised in the Bahamas. As a young child he lived in extreme poverty in a tiny village in Cat Island which had no electricity or running water. His father was an agriculturalist, but when things became desperate the family moved to the capital of the Bahamas, Nassau, to attempt to scuffle a living. Although Poitier's father was poor, he was apparently a tremendously dignified man. Poitier said in later years, "My father was never a man of self-pity. He had a wonderful sense of himself. Every time I took an acting part, from the first part from the first day, I always said to myself: 'this must reflect well on my family'." This was not a careless aspiration. One of the reasons Poitier was so iconic was because he brought dignity and poise to every part he played.

Poitier left school at 13, joined the US Army and finally found himself in New York still only 16 years of age. He knew nobody and he had no formal education. It was an era when, not only were there very few jobs for black actors, but cinema chains in the Deep South of America routinely cut out scenes from films which happened to feature a black person. But Poitier worked his way up from washing dishes to become a film star, winning an Oscar for his performance in Lilies of the Field in 1963. He was also the star of the watershed film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967. In that film he predicts, to a sceptical white father-in-law, that one of his children could become president of the United States. It was the first mainstream Hollywood movie featuring a romance between a black man and a white woman and was extremely controversial in its time. In a 50-year career Poitier was to star in over 40 films, direct nine and write four.

What made Poitier exceptional was that he defied stereotypes. For the first time, cinema audiences in America saw a black male performer who was not a comic or a tap dancer. Poitier's characters were always highly intelligent and dignified, like the man himself. It did not hurt also that he was extremely handsome.

But Poitier did not just break down barriers on screen. He campaigned for black rights away from the screen. A prominent supporter of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he actually took part in many of the big demonstrations and marches of the era, notably the march on Montgomery in Alabama. Martin Luther King said of Poitier: "He is a man who never lost his concern for the least of God's children."

On Thursday there was a special ceremony at the White House where the Medal of Freedom was handed out to the 16 recipients by the president himself. Sidney Poitier received the longest round of applause from the audience and a very special hug from the president. It was an extraordinary moment, the fulfilment of a line in a film over 40 years ago.

Source: Diane Abbott for the Jamaica Observer