Born New York City
Cicely Tyson dedicated her career on stage, in television and in film, to representing Black women “who have made positive contributions to my heritage.” Starring in more than one hundred roles over seven decades, she picked those that particularly portrayed the strength and nobility of Black women. Her big break in Sounder, a 1972 movie in which she played the role of a sharecropper’s wife making ends meet for her family, won her accolades, including an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. “The story in ‘Sounder’ is a part of our history, a testimony to the strength of humankind,” Tyson said. “Our whole Black heritage is that of struggle, pride and dignity. The Black woman has never been shown on the screen this way before.” Tyson credited her mother, an immigrant from the Caribbean island of Nevis who raised a family under poor economic circumstances, as her role model.
Tyson started her career as a model, and her photograph was featured in magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar before she was encouraged to act by the actor Evelyn Davis. Her first major success was starring in the 1961 Broadway play The Blacks as part of its original cast. She played a prostitute in a role that garnered her a Vernon Rice Award in 1962. However, in 1972, Tyson described her reluctance to depict Black women as flat stereotypes. “We Black actresses have played so many prostitutes and drug addicts and housemaids, always negative,” she told Parade magazine. “I won’t play that kind of characterless role anymore, even if I have to go back to starving.” Tyson subsequently won three Emmys—including what became one of her signature roles in the 1974 CBS special The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, adapted from the novel by Ernest J. Gaines. In 2015, Tyson received the Kennedy Center honors, and the following year, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barrack Obama. In 2018, Tyson was the first Black Actress to be awarded an honorary Oscar and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. Two years later, she won a career achievement Peabody Award.
Tyson focused her life on achieving an outstanding career, although she was married to the renowned jazz musician Miles Davis from 1981 to 1989. Today, she is recalled as an icon of the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which tapped into cultural productions of art and film to gather and empower African Americans, using mottos such as “Think black, buy black” and “Black is beautiful.” When she was eighty-eight, Tyson became the oldest person to win a Tony Award for her role in a revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful. Of her choice to return to the stage as an elderly woman, she stated, “‘One more great role,’ I said. I didn’t want to be greedy. I just wanted one more.”
In this c. 1986–87 portrait by Brian Lanker, Cicely Tyson is portrayed as glamorous yet vulnerable. The photograph was taken as a part of the series by Lanker that investigated the contributions of contemporary Black women in the United States. In her contribution to the book, she wrote, “I did not set out to become a role model. I did set out to become the best possible actress I could be. My careful choice of roles came as a direct result of the type of negative images that were being projected of Black people throughout the world, particularly Black women. I knew deep within me that I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress—I had something to say as a member of the human race, Black and female.”
