P. Jay Sidney

Marriage and activism

Sidney married Carol Foster in 1954. She was a well-educated (graduate of Howard University) daughter of a dentist. She had moved to New York to be a French translator, but dreamed of being an actress. They had a tumultuous marriage, and finally separated (they did not officially divorce until 1977, however) without having children. Carol Foster Sidney later did become a New York actress, with a 10-year career there.

Carol Foster Sidney supported her husband's activism, marching with him and other activists, including his lawyer and close friend Bruce M. Wright. They picketed offices such as CBS and BBDO, and other places, passing out flyers. He paid for advertisements in The New York Times advocating a boycott against Lever Brothers, which used black talent only in its TVs ads aimed at blacks.

In 1962, Sidney testified before the House, arguing against "discrimination that is almost all-pervading, that is calculated and continuing".

In 1967, he left a role on the long-running TV soap As the World Turns because of its policy that offered employment contracts to white actors but not to blacks.

Noted liberal television personality David Susskind also came under Sidney's fire for not moving swiftly enough to include black presence and black history in his work. Sidney was finally rewarded by a role in a gritty and iconoclastic series East Side/West Side, with James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. The series ran for one season.

Sidney's last significant appearance was in the 1987 TV movie A Gathering of Old Men. But by the time he finished his career, in some ways little had changed; in his final movie, A Kiss Before Dying (1991), he played a bellman.

Unpublished memoir

Sidney collected his press clippings in a binder, which is saved at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The collection also included a 15-page handwritten memoir (labeled "ephemera"). Although written in the third person, it appears to be Sidney's summary of his life and career.

His vision Emily Nussbaum in a 2015 article in The New Yorker writes that as early as 1954 Sidney was encouraging protest, through the Amsterdam News, at the fact that "by not including Negroes in at least approximately the numbers and the roles in which they occur in American life, television and radio programs that purport to give a true picture of American life malign and misrepresent Negro citizens as a whole".

Filmography

The Joe Louis Story (1953) - John Roxborough, Handler A Face in the Crowd (1957) - Llewellyn (uncredited) Black Like Me (1964) - Frank Newcomb No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) - Medical Examiner (uncredited) Brother John (1971) - Rev. MacGill Trading Places (1983) - Heritage Club Doorman A Kiss Before Dying (1991) - Bellman (final film role)