Without condescension or condemnation, Sidney Poitier’s work affirms the power of the individual. On the stage, in the movies and on television, he is a pioneer.

With an early understanding of the influence of these media, he has offered protest and humanity, exhorted social change and civil progress. On and off screen he is an artist, a diplomat and a cultural icon. His career has defined and documented the struggle for equality.

Poitier, a two-time Academy Award-winning actor, will share his experiences Tuesday at the William H. Lively Lecture of the Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series. The lecture will begin at 8 p.m. in McFarlin Auditorium.

On Wednesday, Poitier will participate in a question and answer session for SMU students. It will be held from 9 to 9:50 a.m. in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center Theatre.

Poitier was born in 1924 in Miami. When Poitier was 11, his father, a poor tomato farmer, moved the family to the village of Cat Island, Bahamas.

There he first saw movies and understood the power of cinema. At the age of 16, Poitier moved to New York to pursue an acting career.

He found work washing dishes and then as a janitor for the American Negro Theatre in exchange for acting lessons.

At the American Negro Theatre he made his public debut. Poitier understudied Harry Belafonte in the play Days of Our Youth for one night. This led to other roles. Poitier was a hit. On stage in New York he continued to hone his craft.

In 1950 he made his film debut. A violent account of racial hatred, NoWay Out, made him a hero in the Bahamas. The colonial government censored the film, and the protests that followed were catalyst to a political party and eventual overturn of British colonial rule.

Poitier became an understated spokesman for civil rights. Throughout the ’50s he made some of the most important and controversial movies of all time. Before civil rights were properly addressed in the United States, he raised questions of racial equality abroad.

He made Cry, The Beloved Country, which is about apartheid in South Africa. He confronted problems of racism, poverty and education at home in The Blackboard Jungle.

The Defiant Ones still stands firmly as a metaphor of race relations in mutual pursuit of freedom. The film is about two escaped prisoners, one black and one white, who are bound together by chains. The two must overcome issues of race in their struggle for freedom. Poitier was nominated for an Academy Award for the role.

In 1962, A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black playwright to show on Broadway. Poitier returned to the stage as Walter Lee in Lorraine Hansberry’s insightful and moving reflection of black family life. He would re-create his role in the 1970 Hollywood adaptation of the play. In 1962, for his role in Lilies of the Field, the movie industry chose Poitier for its greatest award, making him the first black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Before 2002, he was the only black American to win the award.

As Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Prize and Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court, Poitier continued to examine and illuminate the problems of racial inequality through film.

Poitier continued to address civil rights in his powerful portrayal of a black detective from the North trying to solve a murder in a Southern town in In the Heat of the Night.

With Patch of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he focused on interracial romance. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was the first Hollywood movie about interracial romance that did not end tragically.

Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Poitier was criticized for being too passive. He set his acting aside and moved back to the Bahamas to assess his career. In 1988, after directing several films, he returned to acting in Shoot to Kill.

Nearly 50 years after Cry, The Beloved Country Poitier returned to the now apartheid-free South Africa, playing another hero for racial equality, Nelson Mandela, in the 1997 television documentary drama Mandela and DeKlerk.