"The [film] industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. . . And the black face, truthfully reflected, is not only no part of this dream, it is antithetical to it. This puts the black performer in a rather grim bind. And on the other hand, he really has no right not to appear [...] for all those people who need to see him."

In 1968, James Baldwin penned a piece for Look magazine about Hollywood and his friend, the Bahamian and American Hollywood star Sidney Poitier, who had become the first Black performer to win an Oscar for Best Actor a few years earlier (1964). Towards the end of his piece, which tends passionately and kindly with Poitier's heavy burden of representation, Baldwin reminds the reader that "Sidney, like all of us, is caught in a storm". That storm was 1960s America, in the throes of a bitter struggle over racial equality, and Baldwin was speaking to the perception that Sidney had watered down and sold out, and that by doing so had become a sort of accomplice to the violence directed at African Americans day in, day out, more than a century after the constitutional outlawing of slavery. As Baldwin had it, whilst never taking away from Poitier's talent or grace, or his undeniable power on-screen, ".... every Negro celebrity is regarded with some distrust by black people, who have every reason in the world to feel themselves abandoned.... Black people have been robbed of everything in this country, and they don’t want to be robbed of their artists... they felt that Sidney was, in effect, being used against them."

Meanwhile, Sidney kept his internal struggles largely to himself – but he sure did have them. In a 1961 interview with Newsweek he alluded to the bind he found himself in: "I do not like myself as an actor... to see myself on the screen [...] makes me uncomfortable, ashamed. The image I see up there is in conflict with the one I hold of myself". He wanted to direct, he said, but it was over a decade before he would manage to make his first film. In the meantime, he dealt in his own way with the political challenges of the day, participating in Martin Luther King's March on Washington, speaking publicly about civil rights, and travelling to Kenya to take part in the nation's independence celebrations. Then came perhaps his most famous acting roles — In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, To Sir, with Love. 

In 1972, Sidney Poitier finally made his directorial debut with Buck and the Preacher, returning to the Western genre (having previously acted in the 1966 Duel at Diablo as James Gardner's sidekick) but now with three central Black characters and a rarely-seen, historical backdrop of the African-American experience, to a blues-inflected score written by Jazz trumpeter and saxophonist Benny Carter. 

The film is set following emancipation (1863) and the end of the civil war (1865), when thousands of so-called  "Exodusters" left the states along the Mississippi river (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee) for Kansas. Leaving painful memories of slavery behind them in the South, where they were blocked from owning land, those migrating communities hoped to find a better life further north –but it was rarely a straightforward journey to freedom.

Filmed in Mexico and Kenya and featuring his old friends Harry Belafonte (who also produced) as his comically wayward sidekick, Preacher, and Ruby Dee as his wife, Ruth (the three first met under the roof of Harlem's American Negro Theatre in the 1940s, where they all began their careers), Poitier plays the film's hero Buck, a wagonmaster dedicated to ensuring that families escaping the South make it across "the West" to the Great Plains, despite the looming threat of racist white bounty hunters on their tails. The film also depicts a series of encounters and negotiations with the Indigenous people whose lands the caravans are traversing, in which it is clear who their common enemy is. First and foremost, though, Buck and the Preacher is a heart-warming tale of the comical encounter between the wholesome, sincere Buck and the wayward, wise-cracking Preacher, and the unlikely friendship they forge along the way towards an uncertain future.

Less hardened and more family-friendly than its Blaxploitation cousins of the same era, Buck and the Preacher is, like them, an entertainment film directed primarily at a Black audience, as Poitier and Belafonte intended. As cultural critic Aisha Harris writes, "it states 'I’m Black and I’m proud' in its own ways".

Ultimately, Sidney Poitier is revered first and foremost for his luminosity and elegance as an actor, for the significance of his unique place in American cinema at such a pivotal moment in history. Buck and the Preacher may not be a film that he is often remembered for, then, but it has its own place in the journey of US-American cinema and is a compassionate reminder of the historical and ongoing struggles of Black Americans both on and off the screen.