This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

Up next, a story about Sidney Poitier, perhaps the most important actor of the 20th century,

and certainly an actor who taught us all how to live and how to conduct ourselves.

Sidney Poitier, man, actor, I, was the first full biography of Portier, written by

a professor of history at the University of Memphis, which is just an hour north of where we

broadcast in Oxford, Mississippi. So Greg Hengler took the short drive north to get the story.

Let's take a listen.

My name is Aram Gizuzian. I'm a professor of history at the University of Memphis.

And the first book I ever wrote was Sidney Poitier, man-actor icon in 2004. And that book

was originally my PhD dissertation when I was a student at Purdue University.

Sydney was born on Cat Island, which is one of the out islands in the Bahamas.

In other words, it was a primarily rural, agricultural island on the cusp of the Bahamas.

And it was a fairly isolated place in his childhood when he was growing up in the 1930s.

It was in the midst of the Great Depression. It was a place that still had kind of a barter economy

rather than a cash economy. And there was sort of a lot of freedom for a young child like

Sidney Poitouin de Rome. Sidney was the youngest of seven children. I think there

were five brothers and two sisters. The oldest brother, Cyril, was about 15 years older than he was.

And having a big family like the Poitiers was more the rule than the exception on Cat Island

because there were farming families for the most part, the more children you had, the more

people you could put to work.

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