Warren Oates as Officer Sam Wood points a gun at Poitier’s
Virgil Tibbs in a scene from 1967’s In the Heat of the Night.I
was asked to write about the Oscar-winning
film In the Heat of the Night, to say if I thought
that it and some of its more dramatic scenes
were still relevant today. I wondered at what
my answer might be. I mean, how could a run-
of-the-mill crime story written half a century
ago still address the ills of such a vibrant
culture, so aware of our conscious and uncon-
scious racist, sexist, homophobic and ageist
flaws? How could a movie that predates cell-
phones offer deep insight into the economic
divide that crushes the majority of workers in
today’s world?
I hadn’t seen the movie in 48 years. Back
then, most Northern Negroes (now called
African-Americans), like myself, felt that
Mississippi was akin to Nazi Germany. Bull
Connor and George Wallace were our Stalin
and Hitler. At that time, we cheered if a proud
black man appeared in a short scene of a film,
if the plight of racism was simply mentioned
in passing. I remember as a child watching
The Phil Silvers Show where there was one black
male soldier in Sgt. Bilko’s barracks. That
one man never spoke, that I remember, but he
showed up with the rest of the men in almost
every episode. I watched that show religiously,
just to see an image of my people on the hal-
lowed TV screen. Sidney Poitier broke that
glass wall when he took center stage. He was
that deep breath we had all been waiting for.
Those days of furtive glances of my people
and others are over. From James Baldwin
to Ta-Nehisi Coates, we have been exposed to
deft interpretations of our culture and its
failings. Our great thinkers no longer beg for
equality from a people who don’t know their
own history; now, we understand our splen-
dor and beauty in the light of day. If this truth
is only coming of age today, then how couldFrom left: In the Heat of the
Night’s surviving principal
creators Sidney Poitier,
producer Walter Mirisch,
composer Quincy Jones and
director Norman Jewison were
photographed Feb. 6 at
Poitier’s home in Beverly Hills.
Missing from the surviving
cast are Lee Grant, who
was unable to travel from
New York, and Scott Wilson,
who was working abroad.
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