'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' told the story of many families, including mine

Learning that Sidney Poitier had died, I thought first of his performance in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," not because it was his best film, or even my favorite, but because it told the story of so many families, including mine.

Poitier was an actor-activist in the best sense of the word. Not only was he committed, in word, deed and dollar, to the civil rights movement, but his performances were their own form of activism; Poitier made breaking barriers and rearranging cultural consciousness an art form. Some of this had to do simply with his being one of the few Black actors playing leads in mainstream films for so long, but more important than the roles he took was how he played them.

"He's so calm and sure of everything," Katharine Houghton's