Actress Cicely Tyson, known for ‘Sounder,’ ‘Trip to Bountiful,’ dies
When Cicely Tyson accepted an Emmy in 1974 for her starring role in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” she smiled into the camera and spoke straight to her mother: “You see, Mom,” she said, “it wasn’t really a den of iniquity after all.”
Some two decades earlier, the sternly religious Theodosia Tyson had thrown her daughter out of her New York City home for getting into the “sinful” entertainment business. For two years, they didn’t see each other.
Only much later did Theodosia acknowledge that her daughter, who by then was famous for the disciplined and elegant quality of her acting, had chosen superbly. Tyson worked less often than she could have because of her insistence that roles for Black women reflect a sense of power and grace.
Always coy about her age and secretive about her private life, Tyson died Thursday afternoon, her manager Larry Thompson said. He did not say where she died or if a cause is known. According to her recently released memoir “Just As I Am,” she was 87. Public records indicate she was 96.
One thing she was not shy about was her long string of acting achievements.
In 1972, she was nominated for an Oscar for “Sounder,” playing a sharecropper whose husband is convicted for stealing a piece of meat. With her performance two years later in “Jane Pittman,” a story that culminates with Pittman, a 110-yearold ex-slave, defiantly drinking from an all-white water fountain, she cemented her reputation as one of America’s preeminent Black actresses.
She performed in dozens of TV programs, films and stage plays, and in 2013 received a Tony award for her lead performance in “The Trip to Bountiful.” She was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2015. The next year, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the nation.
While her resume was extensive and her preparation for roles exhaustive, Tyson also cared about the example she set for other Black women. The day before her appearance as an African woman in a 1959 drama on CBS’ “Camera Three,” she had her stylishly straightened hair cut off and cropped as close as possible.
With that deceptively simple choice, Tyson became by many accounts the first Black woman to appear on TV with natural hair, a choice that triggered “a not-so-minor earthquake in the minds of young Black women,” Ms. magazine recounted.
“All Black women needed was some public person to take the first step toward a more positive identification with African beauty,” Ms. said. “And that person was Cicely Tyson.”
A few years later, she unveiled an Afro, and then corn rows on “East Side/West Side,” an early 1960s TV series about social workers in New York City.
For Tyson, it was a question of principle.
“We were ashamed of everything that we were,” she told Florida college students in 1976. “Now our young people won’t have to worry about their kinky hair. They can direct their energies to more worthwhile things.”
Tyson was born in New York City to Theodosia and William A. Tyson, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. For most of her career, Tyson said she was born on Dec. 19, 1933, but public records indicate her birth date was Dec. 18, 1924.
When she was growing up in East Harlem, her father was a house painter and her mother a maid. They divorced when Tyson was a child. When she was 9, she sold grocery bags on the street to help make ends meet.