Obituary: Ivan Dixon

For most people, Ivan Dixon, who has died of kidney failure aged 76, was the black guy in the TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes, set in a German PoW camp during the second world war. From 1965 to 1970, He played Sergeant James "Kinch" Kinchloe, the communications specialist frequently ordered by Colonel Hogan (Bob Crane) to encode messages. Although rather less dominant than some of the other leading characters, Kinch took part in most of the group's schemes to outwit their Nazi captors. More significant, however, was that Dixon, who "didn't really enjoy being Sergeant Kinchloe", was one of the first African-American actors to play a leading character in a popular sitcom who was not an underling.

It was but a small victory on the road to equality, and there seemed nothing in the likable portrayal of Kinchloe to suggest that Dixon was a radical figure. Yet, by the time he took the role, he had already broken through several race barriers and would subsequently go on to break through even more. In 1959, Dixon appeared in Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking drama A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play by a black woman and the first to be directed on Broadway by a black man (Lloyd Richards). It ran for 538 performances, and for the first time black audiences came to Broadway to see a play about themselves. Dixon played Joseph Asagai, the Nigerian exchange student who tries to persuade the daughter of the family to embrace a "back-to-Africa" philosophy.

Almost the complete Broadway cast of the play, including its star, Sidney Poitier, were retained for the slightly toned-down 1961 film version. Dixon had become friends with Poitier when they appeared together as Mau Mau fighters in Something of Value (1957). Dixon then supported Poitier in Otto Preminger's movie Porgy and Bess (1959), and played his brother in A Patch of Blue (1965). Dixon also acted as Poitier's stunt double in The Defiant Ones (1958).

He was born in Harlem, the son of a grocery store owner. He graduated in drama from North Carolina Central University in 1954, and three years later appeared on Broadway, playing three roles in Cave Dwellers, the William Saroyan play about the theatre, followed by A Raisin in the Sun. Dixon then found plentiful employment in television series such as Perry Mason, The Defenders, Dr Kildare and The Twilight Zone, before making Nothing but a Man (1964), the film of which he was proudest.

In it, he played a railroad worker in the deep south, facing racial injustice and seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood, not wishing to repeat the mistakes his own father committed. The film, directed by German-born Michael Roemer, was a straightforward depiction of black life in the US, with Dixon's honest portrayal one of its great strengths.

After his four-and-a-half-year stint on Hogan's Heroes, Dixon directed television shows, starting with a couple of episodes of the Bill Cosby Show, before gradually widening his net to include The Waltons, The Rockford Files, and Magnum PI. He also directed a blaxploitation thriller Trouble Man (1972). In a way, he had learned from Poitier how to tread the fine line between black aspirations and white anxieties, although Dixon overstepped the line when he directed the inflammatory The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973).

The film concerned the first black CIA agent (Lawrence Cook) who, after five years of menial assignments, quits and uses the skills he learned about terrorist tactics to organise black and Latino teenage gangs into guerrilla outfits to bring instability to American cities. "You really wanna mess with whitey," he tells them. "I can show you how." One of his methods was to gain access to white establishments. "Remember, a black man with a mop, tray or broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country, and a smiling black man is invisible."

The film, which Dixon also produced - after managing to raise nearly all of its $1m budget from black investors - explained that it "expressed everything that I felt about race ... I had tried only to depict black anger, not to suggest armed revolt as a solution." Yet, inevitably, the distributors pulled the film after two weeks under pressure from the FBI. For all the film's deficiencies, The Spook Who Sat by the Door remains one of the few uncompromising representations of black armed resistance in the US.

Dixon went on to direct far less incendiary material for television and appeared in a few films, notably Michael Schultz's funny and funky Car Wash (1976) as the wise ex-con trying to run his business in the midst of chaos.

He is survived by his wife of 52 years, a daughter and a son.

Ivan Dixon, actor and director; born April 6 1931; died March 16 2008