From James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (1976):

Sylvia Sidney was the only American film actress who reminded me of a colored girl, or woman–which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality. All of the others, without exception, were white, and even when they moved me…they moved me from that distance….And, similarly, while I admired [some white male actors] the only actor of the era with whom I identified was Henry Fonda. I was not alone. A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, swore that Fonda had colored blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don’t walk like that! and he imitated Fonda’s stubborn, patient, wide-legged walk away from the camera. My reaction to Sylvia Sidney was certainly due, in part, to the kind of film she appeared in during that time: Fury,; Mary Burns; Fugitive; You and Me ….It was almost as though she and I had a secret: she seemed to know something I knew. Every street in New York ends in a river: this was the legend which begins the film, Dead End, and I was enormously grateful for it. I had never thought of that before. Sylvia Sidney, facing a cop in this film, pulling her black hat back from her forehead: “One of your lousy cops gave me that.” She was always being beaten up, victimized, weeping, and she she should have been drearier than Tom Mix’s girlfriends. But I always understood her–in a way, she reminded me of Bill [a much beloved white teacher], for I had seen Bill facing hostile cops. Bill took us on a picnic downtown once, and there was supposed to be ice cream waiting for us at a police station. The cops didn’t like Bill, didn’t like the fact that we were colored kids, and didn’t want to give up the ice cream. I don’t remember anything Bill said. I just remember her face as she stared at the cop, clearly intending to stand there until the ice cream all over the world melted or until the earth’s surface froze, and she got us our ice cream, saying Thank you, I remember, as we left.