DON SURBER: Sidney Poitier: Enemy of the People. “The problem with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? is it stars Sidney Poitier. He’s too white.”
Back in the early ’90s, ABC did a — really good — docudrama on the Brown case called Separate But Equal. It closely tracks Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice, an oral history of the case done while the major figures were still alive. My old lawprof and mentor Charles Black (who wrote the brief with Thurgood Marshall in the case) was still alive then, and we talked about it on the phone after we’d watched it. Charlie’s comment: “They got Sidney Poitier to play Thurgood, and then they got some S.O.B. that looked just like me.” I show the film in class sometimes, as its treatment of the legal issues is shockingly good for a movie, much less a TV movie.
The DVD is $59.99 on Amazon, which is a lot more than I remember. I wonder if that’s in anticipation of Poitier being cancelled as insufficiently black. It would be hilarious, except that mass hysteria on the part of people running all our major institutions isn’t actually funny. “Liberals now make the same argument the Ku Klux Klan did in denying the civil war was about slavery. Demoting Poitier to Stepin Fetchit status should serve as a warning not just to Will Smith and Obama, but to all black people. You may not be next, but you are on the list.”
UPDATE: And the price keeps rising! I think when I bought it a few years ago it was $14.99. (Bumped).