Canada Lee

Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata was born on the third of March 1907 at New York City, the elder of two sons of James Cornelius Canegata — a postal worker of Virgin Islands descent — and Lydia Whaley Canegata, a homemaker of West Indian background. He was raised in Harlem and was educated at the city's public schools. He left home at fourteen to apprentice as a jockey at the Saratoga track. He won an estimated three hundred races over the following four years but was forced to retire from racing in 1925 when he grew past the jockey weight limit.

He fought briefly as a professional boxer under the ring name Canada Lee — a corruption of "Lee Canegata" by a New Jersey ring announcer — and accumulated across the years 1926 to 1933 an estimated one hundred ninety-five wins, twenty-five losses and four draws as a welterweight, including the welterweight championship of New York. He was forced to retire from boxing in 1933 by detached retinas and the partial blindness of his right eye.

He turned to the stage at twenty-seven through the WPA Federal Theatre Project, where he played in Orson Welles's 1936 "Voodoo Macbeth" — the all-Black production at the Lafayette Theatre that ran for one hundred and fifty consecutive nights. His decisive role was as Bigger Thomas in Welles's 1941 Broadway production of Native Son — Richard Wright's collaboration with the dramatist Paul Green. The production opened at the St. James Theatre on the twenty-fourth of March 1941, ran for one hundred and fourteen performances and made his national reputation.

He appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) — as Joe Spencer, in the first major Hollywood role in which a Black character speaks as an equal with the white crew throughout — and in Robert Rossen's Body and Soul (1947), in which he played the doomed Black boxer Ben Chaplin. He starred opposite Sidney Poitier (placed in this archive) in Zoltán Korda's 1951 anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country — Lee's last completed film.

He was placed on the Hollywood and Broadway blacklist in 1950 over his association with the National Negro Congress and the American Negro Theatre. The blacklist was conducted against him from 1950 to his death by a sequence of FBI investigations and HUAC subpoenas. He died of a heart attack at his Manhattan apartment on the ninth of May 1952, at forty-five.

He is honored here as the most consequential Black stage actor destroyed by the Hollywood blacklist.