Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee
The Untold Tragedy of the Great Black Actor, Activist, and Athlete
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first biography of the great black actor, activist, athlete--and tragic victim of the blacklist
Imagine an actor as familiar to audiences as Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman are today--who is then virtually deleted from public memory. Such is the story of Canada Lee. Among the most respected black actors of the forties and a tireless civil rights advocate, Lee was unjustly dishonored, his name reduced to a footnote in the history of the McCarthy era, his death one of a handful directly attributable to the blacklist.
Born in Harlem in 1907, Lee was a Renaissance man. A musical prodigy on violin and piano at eleven, by thirteen he had become a successful jockey and by his twenties a champion boxer. After wandering into auditions for the WPA Negro Theater Project, Lee took up acting and soon shot to stardom in Orson Welles's Broadway production of Native Son, later appearing in such classic films as Lifeboat and the original Cry, the Beloved Country.
But Lee's meteoric rise to fame was followed by a devastating fall. Labeled a Communist by the FBI and HUAC as early as 1943, Lee was pilloried during the notorious spy trial of Judith Coplon in 1949, then condemned in longtime friend Ed Sullivan's column. He died in 1952, forty-five and penniless, a heartbroken casualty of a dangerous and conflicted time.
Now, after nearly a decade of research, Mona Z. Smith revives the legacy of a man who was perhaps the blacklist's most tragic victim.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A talented actor and pioneering civil rights activist, Lee died in 1952 at age 45 technically from uremia, but in the eyes of many, as investigative journalist and playwright Smith shows, from the stress of being blacklisted. Lee's career was extraordinary. Leaving home at 13 to become a racetrack jockey, he became a boxer, dabbled in music and was drawn into acting by the Depression-era Federal Theater Project. He was in Hollywood films, including Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) and Rossen's Body and Soul (1947). Smith deftly depicts New York's theater scene, showing how Lee became one of the first African-Americans to gain acceptance in white theater, and thoroughly documents Lee's outspoken support for civil rights. Lee's speechmaking caught the attention of Cold War Red-baiters, and in 1949, he started hearing rumors he'd been blacklisted. While he did work in one final film 1951's Cry, the Beloved Country the strain of not being able to work or support his family may have irritated his hypertension, leading to kidney failure. Smith's admiration for Lee his artistry, his desegregation campaigns, his generosity toward the needy, his fellowship with other African-American artists is so overwhelming that Lee emerges as a two-dimensional character. Still, students of African-American, theater and Cold War history will find this a valuable reference. 32 b&w illus. not seen by PW.