Photo Credit: 2021alamidwinter.org
It was a solemn day in film once the news of the passing of late actress Cicely Tyson was announced on January 28th. Many of the remarks made about the late award-winning actress were in reference to how she paved the way for people of color and women in film.
Cicely Tyson was the first African American to be in a television drama when she was featured in the series East Side/West Side in 1963. She was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 1972 for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her role in Sounder. Then in 1974 for her performance in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, She won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, and Emmy Award for Actress of the Year- Special. Years later, she won another Emmy in 1994 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in Miniseries or Special, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Tyson won a Tony Award in 2013 for Best Actress in Play, The Trip to Beautiful.
While Tyson was becoming a household name for mainstream film, she was also becoming a hero for the black community. Throughout her career, Tyson was not afraid to speak out on the negative ways in which African American people were portrayed in the media.“They’d been brainwashed into believing that all things relating to physical blackness were bad, negative, less than good and less than white. But I knew it was just a question of time before the whole picture took on its true colors,” Tyson said in a 1972 Boston Globe interview.
Tyson made it her life -long mission to change the narrative and the image of blackness.Tyson was also one of the first African American women to wear her hair in an afro on television, which later inspired other black women to follow in her footsteps. In a recent Instagram post, actress Viola Davis said: “You made me feel loved and valued in a world where there is still a cloak of invisibility for us dark chocolate girls you gave me permission to dream… because it was only in my dreams that I could see possibilities in myself.”
Throughout the 1970s Tyson changed the narrative by choosing roles that went against the negative stereotypes of Black people. In each film, Tyson played the role of a strong black woman with much dignity and intellect. In a 2015 article titled Cicely Tyson: A pioneer stretches her acting muscles in a new career chapter published by the Washington Post, Tyson said, “what you put there is everlasting on film … And there was no way in the world that I was going to do something that I thought was degrading to myself as a woman, myself as a Black woman, to women in general, to my race of people for future generations.”
Some of Tyson’s other honors includes Peabody Career Achievement 2020; Inducted in Television Hall of Fame 2020, earlier in 2015 was recipient of Kennedy Center Honors and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2016. Her life’s work and influence in the film industry, particularly people of color, is pure legendary. Tyson is and will forever be considered a film icon.
