Cicely Tyson

Cicely Louise Tyson was born on the eighteenth of December 1924 at the East Harlem district of New York, the eldest of three children of William Augustine Tyson — a carpenter from the West Indian island of Nevis — and Theodosia Tyson, a domestic worker also Nevisian. The Tyson family was strict Episcopalian; she sang in the choir of St. John's Episcopal Church through her teens. She left school at fifteen to work as a typist for the American Red Cross. The casting agency that discovered her — for an Ebony magazine fashion shoot — placed her at twenty-two in modelling work that supported her transition into theatre.

She studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. She made her Off-Broadway debut in 1956 in The Spectrum and appeared subsequently in the original 1959 production of The Cool World, in Vinnette Carroll's 1962 Moon on a Rainbow Shawl with Errol John, and in the 1963 to 1965 East Side/West Side television series in which she became the first African American to play a regular role in a television drama.

Her decisive screen role was as Rebecca Morgan in Martin Ritt's 1972 Sounder — the role for which she received the 1973 Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The performance, of the wife and mother on a Louisiana sharecropper's plot in the 1930s, established her as the foremost African American film actress of her generation. The 1974 CBS telecast of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman — in which she played the title role from young womanhood to one hundred and ten — won her two Emmy Awards, the first time the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Special and the Actress of the Year Emmys had been awarded to the same performer.

She played Coretta Scott King in King (1978), Harriet Tubman in A Woman Called Moose (1978), Marva Trotter Louis in The Joe Louis Story (1953) — wait, that was earlier — Binta in Roots (1977), and continued to work in the major productions of American Black film and television through the next four decades. She won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for The Trip to Bountiful at eighty-eight — the first African American Tony for Best Actress in a Play and the oldest woman to receive a Best Actress Tony in any category.

She published her memoir Just As I Am in January 2021. She died at New York City on the twenty-eighth of January 2021, at ninety-six.

She is honored here as the matriarch of African American screen.