"Imagine an actor as familiar to audiences as Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Morgan Freeman are today - who is then virtually deleted from cultural history. Such is the story of Canada Lee. Among the most respected black actors of the 1940s and a passionate civil rights advocate, Lee was reduced to a footnote in the history of the McCarthy era, and his death one of a handful directly attributable to the blacklist." "Born in Harlem in 1907, Lee was a Depression-era Renaissance man, reinventing himself numerous times during one of our country's darkest periods: a musical prodigy on violin and piano, he made his concert debut at New York's prestigious Aeolian Hall at eleven; by thirteen he had become a successful jockey; in his teens, a pro boxer; and in his twenties, a leading contender for the national welterweight title, until an unlucky blow to the head cost him the sight in one eye and his fighting career. After wandering into auditions for the Federal Theater Project's Negro Unit, Lee took up acting and shot to stardom in Orson Welles's Broadway production of Native Son. He later appeared in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's classic Lifeboat and the original Cry, the Beloved Country with a young Sidney Poitier." "But Lee's meteoric rise to fame was followed by a devastating fall from grace. Labeled a Communist by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee as early as 1943, Lee was pilloried during the notorious spy trial of Judith Coplon in 1949, and his career was ultimately destroyed when his longtime friend Ed Sullivan denounced him in his nationally syndicated column. Lee died in 1952, forty-five and penniless, a heartbroken victim of a dangerous and conflicted time."--Jacket.