Trailblazing Actress And Civil Rights Activist Cicely Tyson Dead At 96

The actress and civil rights activist Cicely Tyson died Thursday at the age of 96, after decades of singular, ground-breaking roles on Broadway and in Hollywood.

Her death was announced by her long-time manager, who did not specify a cause of death.

Born in East Harlem in 1924, Tyson worked as a typist at the Red Cross before becoming a model for Ebony Magazine and studied at the Actors Studio, according to several reports.

Her career often defied the stereotypical roles that Black women were relegated to during her seven decades of acting, at times going without work because of her principles. “She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral, and insisted that African-Americans, even if poor or downtrodden, should be portrayed with dignity,” the New York Times noted.

Tyson’s stage accomplishments started early — she was Eartha Kitt’s understudy in the Broadway production of Jolly’s Progress in 1959, and performed in the Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks in 1961 with James Earl Jones and Louis Gossett Jr. She won a Drama Desk Award for her Off-Broadway performance in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl in 1962 — her first acting award of many, Playbill said.

After several minor roles including playing Portia in the movie adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Tyson found stardom in her role in Sounder in 1972, where she portrayed the head of a Southern sharecropper family and was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe.

“The story in Sounder is a part of our history, a testimony to the strength of humankind,” Tyson told the New York Times in a 1972 interview. “Our whole Black heritage is that of struggle, pride and dignity. The Black woman has never been shown on the screen this way before.”

In 1974 she won an Emmy for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, becoming the first Black woman to win a Lead Actress Emmy.

Her resume reads like a list of some of the most iconic roles on film and screen. According to the Times, Tyson had an incredible stretch where she played “Kunta Kinte’s mother in a mini-series based on Alex Haley’s Roots in 1977...Coretta Scott King in the 1978 NBC mini-series King, about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final years...Harriet Tubman, whose Underground Railroad spirited slaves to freedom, in A Woman Called Moses (1978); and...a Chicago teacher devoted to poor children in The Marva Collins Story (1981). In 1994, she won a supporting actress Emmy for her portrayal of Castalia in the mini-series Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.

Her legacy also includes decades of civil rights work and community building. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Tyson became a founding board member of the Dance Theater of Harlem. “In 1994, an East Harlem building where she lived as a child was named for her; it and three others were rehabilitated for 58 poor families. In 1995, a magnet school she supported in East Orange, N.J., was renamed the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts,” the Times said. “She was honored by the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP — she was an eight-time Image Award winner and 15-time nominee — and the National Council of Negro Women. In 1977, she was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame,” Deadline reported.

In 2015, she was the guest of honor at the Kennedy Center, where a choir from her namesake school performed her favorite gospel song, “Blessed Assurance”:

She was married to the jazz legend Miles Davis from 1981 to 1989, though they remained friends until his death in 1991.

"I wish people knew the Miles Davis that I knew," Tyson told NPR in a recent interview. "Not only was he brilliantly talented, he was brilliantly sensitive. And that is the Miles Davis that people ... don't know that he was trying to protect." Tyson is survived by a daughter from her first marriage.

In addition to her three Emmys, in 2013, at the age of 88, Tyson became the oldest person to win a Tony for her role as Mrs. Carrie Watts in a revival of The Trip to Bountiful. In 2016, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

She won an honorary Oscar in 2018—again, the first awarded to a Black woman—and said during her acceptance speech, "I don’t know that I would cherish a better gift than this. This is the culmination of all those years of have and have-not."

Tyson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020. Last month, Tyson published her long-awaited memoir as well, Just As I Am: