In 1967, the critical success of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner proved the power of the civil rights movement to reshape historically racist institutions like filmmaking. The film centers around a white, upper-class, liberal San Francisco family whose daughter brings home her new fiance, an accomplished Black doctor played by Sidney Poitier. Centering the reaction and gradual warming of the white woman’s parents, played by Hollywood icons Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, the film portrays racism as a generational and individual prejudice — rather than a systemic problem that kept Black people from advancing in society. It portrayed to millions of TV viewers that if Black people could acquire wealth and status, in a non-threatening way, they might be able to gain inclusion and acceptance in American society while ignoring the reality that the majority of Black people in the U.S. at the time were excluded from accessing the means for building wealth and achieving the “American dream.” Most Black Americans at the time were underpaid relative to their white counterparts and denied welfare benefits; many were fighting in the streets for the right to be treated as full citizens.