African American Hero of the Day

Cicely Tyson (1933-)

Actress

Cicely Tyson was born in Harlem, New York, on December 19, 1933, and was raised by a religious and strict mother who associated movies with sin and forbade Cicely to go to movie theaters. Blessed with poise and natural grace, Tyson became a model and appeared on the cover of America's two foremost fashion magazines, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, in 1956. Interested in acting, she began to study drama. In 1959 she appeared on a CBS culture series, Camera Three, with what is believed to be the first natural African hair style worn on television.

Tyson won a role in an Off#Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks (1961), for which she received the 1962 Vernon Rice Award. She then played a lead part in the CBS series East Side, West Side. Tyson subsequently moved into film parts, appearing in The Comedians (1967) and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968).

During the early 1970s Tyson emerged as America's leading black dramatic star. She achieved this through two sterling performances--as Rebecca, the wife of a southern sharecropper in the film Sounder (1972), and as the lead in a television special, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), the story of an ex#slave who, past her hundredth year, challenges racist authority by deliberately drinking from a "white only" water fountain as a white deputy sheriff looks on. Tyson was nominated for an Academy Award for Sounder and was named best actress by the National Society of Film Critics. She won an Emmy for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

In 1978 Tyson portrayed Harriet Tubman in A Woman Called Moses, and Chicago schoolteacher Marva Collins in a made-for-television movie in 1981. On television, she has appeared in Roots (1977), King (1978), Wilma (1978), Cry Freedom (1987), the mini-series The Women of Brewster Place (1989), Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994), Mama Flora's Family (1998), and A Lesson before Dying (1999). Tyson's other film appearances include The Blue Bird (1976), Bustin' Loose (1981), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), Idlewild (2006), Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010), and The Help (2011).

Tyson was presented with a honorary degree from Marymount College in 1979 and from Morehouse College in 2009.

From African American Almanac: 400 Years of Triumph, Courage and Excellence by Lean'tin Bracks, (c) 2012 Visible Ink Press(R). A wealth of milestones, inspiration, and challenges met . . .