A newspaper article from the mid-1950s, headlined "TV'S NEW POLICY FOR NEGROES", depicts Sidney as the lone exception to the dearth of black dramatic actors.
[citation needed] From 1951 on, Sidney made a living on TV, getting a few notable roles, such as Cato in 1952's The Plot to Kidnap General Washington.
[citation needed] In addition to his role as Private Palmer on The Phil Silvers Show (1957–59),[5] Sidney's four-decade career includes The Joe Louis Story (1953),[6] Brother John (1971),[7] A Gathering of Old Men (1987), A Face in the Crowd (1957), and Trading Places (1983).
Carol Foster Sidney supported her husband's activism, marching with him and other activists, including his lawyer and close friend Bruce M. Wright.
In 1967, he left a role on the long-running TV soap As the World Turns because of its policy that offered employment contracts to white actors but not to blacks.
Sidney was finally rewarded by a role in a gritty and iconoclastic series East Side/West Side, with James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson.
But by the time he finished his career, in some ways little had changed; in his final movie, A Kiss Before Dying (1991), he played a bellman.
Sidney collected his press clippings in a binder, which is saved at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Emily Nussbaum in a 2015 article in The New Yorker writes that as early as 1954 Sidney was encouraging protest, through the Amsterdam News, at the fact that "by not including Negroes in at least approximately the numbers and the roles in which they occur in American life, television and radio programs that purport to give a true picture of American life malign and misrepresent Negro citizens as a whole".
[1] She notes that although there was a moment when he believed that television might someday reflect African Americans in their full humanity, in a 1968 speech to the National Freedom Day dinner (Philadelphia), he said: "The 'bad image' of blackness is like the air we breathe, and that makes it harder to recognize".