To Sir With Love author dead at 104
Edward Braithwaite, the Guyanese author who wrote the book To Sir With Love, has died at age 104. He died last Monday in Rockville, Maryland.
To Sir with Love inspired a movie of the same name that starred Sidney Poitier and Scottish singer Lulu.
Born Eustace Edward Ricardo Braithwaite in June 1912, he attended Guyana’s Queen’s College, then City College of New York.
Braithwaite later moved to Britain and enlister in the Royal Air Force, but even with a degree in engineering from Cambridge, he was denied a job in that field because he was black.
Desperate for meaningful employment, he turned to teaching and ended up in an unruly class in a tough London school. The experience is chronicled in To Sir With Love.
Later Braithwaite served as a diplomat for Guyana at the United Nations and in Venezuela.
