Sidney Poitier won Best Actor at the 36th Academy Awards on April 13, 1964, in Santa Monica, California, for playing Homer, a reluctant handyman who helps a group of German nuns build a chapel in the desert, in Lilies of the Field. He was the first Black man to win the award, and the win came in the same year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

The actor was born in Miami on February 20, 1927, while his Bahamian parents were visiting, and grew up on a tomato farm in the Bahamas with one year of formal schooling. He got his first break at the American Negro Theater, where he took over a role from Harry Belafonte when he fell ill. His breakthrough came in Blackboard Jungle in 1955, and in 1958 he became the first Black man nominated for a lead acting Oscar, for The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis. In 1967 he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn and…