"They call me Mister Tibbs!"

Poitier did not want to shoot the film in Mississippi because he had been harassed by the Ku Klux Klan when he had visited there with Harry Belafonte at the height of the civil rights movement in 1964, so most of it was filmed in Sparta, Illinois. Filmmakers even changed the name of the fictional Mississippi town in the movie to Sparta so they wouldn’t have to pay to have the town’s water tower repainted.