What it argues
The Measure of a Man is Sidney Poitier's reflective autobiography, published when he was in his early seventies and looking back over a life that took him from bare subsistence on Cat Island in the Bahamas to the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. It is less a chronological account of his career than a meditation on the values — integrity, dignity, the refusal to be diminished — that he identifies as the source of whatever he built.
Poitier grew up in the Bahamas in genuine poverty, moved to Miami as a teenager, discovered racism for the first time, and arrived in New York with almost no money and nowhere to sleep. He trained at the American Negro Theatre, stumbled into film work through a series of accidents and auditions, and eventually broke through in a Hollywood that had almost no place for a Black actor who refused to play demeaning roles. The book is candid about the compromises actors face and the specific pressures that faced Black actors in the 1950s and 1960s.
What it gets right
- 1.
Poitier's framework for a meaningful life comes primarily from his father: a poor Bahamian farmer whose dignity under hardship shaped everything Poitier aspired to.
- 2.
Growing up in the Bahamas, where race operated differently than in the American South, gave Poitier a framework for self-regard that American racism could not fully dismantle.
- 3.
He refused demeaning roles throughout his career, at significant professional cost, because he saw each role as a statement about what Black men were permitted to be.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Sidney Poitier was born in 1927 in Miami while his parents were visiting from Cat Island in the Bahamas, making him a U.S. citizen by accident. He grew up in the Bahamas in poverty and came to New York as a teenager. He trained at the American Negro Theatre and became a major Hollywood star in the 1950s and 1960s, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field in 1964. He was the first Black actor to win that award. He also directed several films and served as Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. He died in January 2022 at the age of 94.
