I remember this GROUNDBREAKING movie like it was just produced yesterday. I was spellbound with Sidney Poitier’s talent and the stark and intense strength of this storyline. I also remember seeing several paperback copies of the book on the round rack at the Bradley Library in Columbus as a young girl.

We so seldom saw images back then, GOOD POSITIVE IMAGES, of Blacks on television and movies and the thing we admired MOST about Sidney Poitier and his acting skills is that he NEVER EVER COMPROMISED. He decided he was a good (GREAT) actor and he wasn’t wasting his talent trying to appease racist whites no matter how much they paid him to do so.

We can say in all honesty that we are not only appreciative of Poitier, but of the writer, E.R. Braithwaite, who had the strength of mind and determination to feature a talented young BLACK TEACHER with a student body of all whites during that time. It was a BREAKTHROUGH movie for us and one for the “Black Pride” Annals of History.

THEY CALLED HIM “SIR.”

At the time, they didn’t even bother to tell us the AUTHOR was Black, like we found out later that The Three Musketeers was written by a Black turncoat Frenchman (Alexandre Dumas) and that many or all of Shakespeare’s plays were ghostwritten by a Black Italian woman (Amelia Bassano). {NOTE: Snopes says Amelia was not a Black woman, per se, but she may have been dark-complected and was described as having BLACK RELATIVES re: [Brought to London from Venice in 1538/9, the dark-skinned Bassanos, some of whom were described in contemporary records as ‘black’ and who may have been of Moroccan as well as Jewish ancestry, became established as the Court recorder troupe. Brought up opposite the theatre district in a family of Venetian Jews of Moroccan ancestry, at the age of 7 she was given to be educated by Countess Susan Bertie, in the family headed by Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby. At the age of 13 she became mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the man in charge of the English theatre. When she got pregnant a decade later she was expelled from court and married off to a minstrel. She was one of the first women to own and operate a school and the first woman to publish a book of original poetry Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). She died in poverty. She has long been identified as the ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets. Her candidacy was announced in March 2007 in a lecture at the Smithsonian Institution as part of the Washington Shakespeare Festival by John Hudson, artistic director of the Dark Lady Players, a New York company who perform the underlying Jewish allegories in the plays. A 5000 word major article on her appears in the Summer/Fall 2009 special issue of The Oxfordian dedicated to the top authorship candidates.”]

People, in America, a DROP, or a DRIB-DRAB of BLACK BLOOD means your @$$ is Black.

They change her (Bassano’s) skin color to PASTY STARCH white in some portraits and said that, in spite of these references to her being a DARK LADY with a BLACK FAMILY, she was NOT Black?
White People, Puhlease…get over yourselves with a quickness. Like YESTERDAY!

Black people INVENTED education, letters and numbers…the same ARABIC ones that you use to do your high-falutin’ mighty whitey deeds to this very day. It should not surprise anyone in the world that a Black woman was responsible for underwriting Shakespearean plays, he didn’t write them all alone, that much is certain.

In the meantime, Rest in Peace, SIR Braithwaite: You done good!