Canada Lee

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Canada Lee : biography

03 March 1907 – 09 May 1952

The same year, the FBI offered to clear Lee’s name if he would publicly call Paul Robeson a communist. Lee refused and responded by saying, “All you’re trying to do is split my race.” According to newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, Lee stated that he intended to come out and “publicly blast Paul Robeson.” However, the fact that the friendship between the two actors remained until Lee’s death suggests that Robeson put no faith in Winchell’s claim.

At the height of the Hollywood blacklist, Lee managed to find work in 1950 as the star of a British film Cry, The Beloved Country, for which both he and Sidney Poitier were smuggled into South Africa as indentured servants in order to play their roles as African ministers. During filming, he had his first heart attack, and he never fully recovered his health. The film’s message of universal brotherhood stands as Lee’s final work towards this aim.

Being on the Hollywood blacklist prevented him from getting further work. Scheduled to appear in Italy to begin production on a filmed version of Othello, he was repeatedly notified that his passport "remained under review". Lee was reportedly to star as Bigger Thomas in the Argentine version of Native Son but was replaced in the role by Richard Wright, author of the novel, when Lee had to withdraw.

Jack Geiger

Canada Lee met and was an influence on H. Jack Geiger, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility. They met in 1940, when Geiger, a 14-year-old middle class Jewish runaway, was backstage at a Broadway production of Native Son. Lee agreed to take Geiger in when he showed up at his door in Harlem asking for a place to stay. Geiger stayed with Lee for over a year (with the consent of Geiger’s parents), and Lee took on the role of surrogate father. During his time with Lee, Geiger was introduced to people like Langston Hughes, Billy Strayhorn, Richard Wright, and Adam Clayton Powell. After many years of varied experiences and an on-going friendship with Lee, Geiger eventually became a journalist, then a doctor. He later went on to co-found the first community health center in the United States: Columbia Point Health Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Geiger would go on to become active in civil rights, to become the founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, then Physicians for Human Rights, establishing community health centers in Mississippi and South Africa, which would eventually lead to 900 community health care centers providing primary health care for more than 14 million low-income people in the country. Geiger says he would never have moved so deeply in these worlds so quickly if not for his experiences with Canada Lee.

Film career

Lee made his screen debut in Keep Punching (1939), a film about boxing. Perhaps his most famous film role was in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), in which he played a sailor. Lee insisted on changing his dialogue, which used a semi-comical dialect. In 1947, he played a supporting role in Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul, another boxing picture. In 1949, he took another supporting role in Lost Boundaries, a drama about passing. Lee’s last film role was in Cry, the Beloved Country (1951).

Along with his varied and successful stage and screen careers, Lee became the first African-American DJ on a major radio station, hosting The Canada Lee Show, and would continue a successful and lengthy radio career as both actor and narrator. His frequently narrated on the groundbreaking series New World A-Comin’, a radio show dedicated to presenting Negro history and culture to mainstream American audiences.

Filmography

Feature films

  • Keep Punching (1939)
  • Lifeboat (1944)
  • Body and Soul (1947)
  • Lost Boundaries (1949)
  • Cry, The Beloved Country (1952)

Documentary shorts

  • We Work Again (1937) (uncredited)
  • Henry Browne, Farmer (1942), a propaganda short narrated by Lee
  • Ask the OPA (1945)
  • The Roosevelt Story (1947)