Canada Lee

Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata was born on 3 March 1907 in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, the son of James Cornelius Canegata, a man of Virgin Islands descent born on St. Croix who migrated to New York, and Lydia Whaley Gadsen. Restless and gifted, the boy who would become Canada Lee lived several lives before the stage claimed him: a jockey at Saratoga Springs at fourteen, then a professional welterweight boxer from 1926 who fought some sixty bouts before a detached retina ended the career, and a violinist and bandleader besides.

He came to acting through the Federal Theatre Project, cast as Banquo in Orson Welles's celebrated 1936 Harlem Macbeth. In 1941 Welles directed him on Broadway as Bigger Thomas in Native Son, adapted from Richard Wright's novel, and Lee became a star overnight. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times judged him "certainly the best Negro actor of his time, as well as one of the best actors in this country." He went on to notable screen and stage work, including Lifeboat, Body and Soul, and Cry, the Beloved Country.

Lee was among the most outspoken artists of his day. He denounced segregation in the wartime armed forces, sold war bonds, lobbied for fair-employment legislation, and lent his voice against racism at home and apartheid abroad. That prominence made him a target: named in FBI files as a "fellow traveler," he was driven from radio and television. When agents offered to clear his name if he would publicly brand Paul Robeson a communist, he refused.

Blacklisted and unable to work, his passport under review as he hoped to film Othello abroad, Canada Lee died on 9 May 1952 in Manhattan at forty-five. He fell silenced but never bowed — a dignity that outlasted every list that tried to erase him.