However, Poitier’s most groundbreaking achievement as an actor came with the 1967 mystery drama In the Heat of the Night, in which Poitier plays Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia police detective who teams ...

Tibbs was simply waiting for his next train at the station in Sparta, Mississippi and the confusion is soon resolved but when local police chief Gillespie learns that Tibbs is the Philadelphia PD ...

Rod Steiger’s Bill Gillespie was the sheriff. He was a redneck but an outsider to Sparta, Mississippi. Gillespie had enough of a modern mind to be able to tell that the insufferable black ...

Get Sparta, MS current weather report with temperature, feels like, wind, humidity, pressure, UV and more from TheWeatherNetwork.com.

I’d wanted to shoot in the South; the book takes place in Georgia and we’d moved the story to Mississippi for the movie. But we had to shoot it in a town in Illinois, called Sparta ...

Andrew Spencer, who was then Sparta’s Chief of Police, shot and killed “Chase”, a rescued pit-bull mixed-breed dog, in November, 2015. The crux of Ms. Womack’s case against Sparta was that ...

Although the film takes place in Mississippi, it was filmed in Sparta, Illinois, largely because of Poitier’s fears. The South, in 1967, was still ordered by Jim Crow laws and the violence of ...