Cicely Tyson

Cicely Louise Tyson was born on the nineteenth of December, 1924, in New York City, and was raised in the East Harlem neighborhood to which her family soon moved. She was the youngest of three children born to immigrants from the West Indian island of Nevis: her father, William Augustine Tyson, a carpenter and painter, and her mother, Fredericka (Huggins) Tyson, a domestic worker. Her elder brother Melrose, called Beau, and her sister Emily completed a devout, church-centered household. As a girl she sang in the choir of an Episcopal congregation and sold shopping bags on Harlem's streets to help her family.

Discovered while working as a typist, Tyson became a sought-after fashion model before turning to the stage and screen. She resolved early to accept only roles that honored Black womanhood, and she kept that vow across seven decades. Her portrayal of Rebecca Morgan in the film Sounder (1972) brought an Academy Award nomination, and her performance in the television drama The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) — aging from enslavement to the civil-rights era — won her two Emmy Awards and enduring reverence.

Tyson's dignity carried her to the summit of every medium she entered. She earned three Emmy Awards and a Peabody, and in 2013, at eighty-eight, won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the Broadway revival of The Trip to Bountiful, becoming the oldest recipient of that honor. She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and an Honorary Academy Award in 2018.

She died on the twenty-eighth of January, 2021, in New York City, at the age of ninety-six, only days after publishing her memoir. Cicely Tyson chose grace over ease and truth over ease of fame, and in doing so she lifted the image of a whole people. May her name be spoken with the honor she gave to every soul she portrayed.