He wasn’t a natural “performer.”

Ed Sullivan had a face made for radio and voice best appreciated in print, where he’d gained fame as a Broadway columnist and sportswriter. Stiff, later somewhat stooped, with odd vocal cadences and a fear of the camera even a child could spot, he couldn’t have been on anybody’s short list of “Let’s put him on this brand new medium, TV, and make him a star.”

But CBS did, back when CBS had guts.

And giving one of the shrewdest judges of talent and entertainment value of his day a Sunday night showcase proved to be historic. Because with 1948’s “Toast of the Town,” which soon morphed into the cultural institution known as “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Sullivan introduced America to itself through entertainers — filling his stage and our tiny screens at home with Broadway’s best, vaudeville greats, jazz legends and pop and rock’n roll legends in the making.

And as the new documentary “Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan” makes crystal clear, Sullivan didn’t care what race these performers were. At a time when segregation ruled the South and racial tolerance wasn’t widespread in the rest of America, Sullivan booked, flattered, chatted-up and introduced white America to the wellspring of talent it was missing out on. He lauded Black sports figures, praised Black singers, patted his congratulations on backs that much of America knew nothing about or would ever consider listening to, much less touching. He held hands with Black child performers and hugged and joked around with Black singing stars and longtime Black friends in jazz and s

Threats came in, sponsors got nervous and CBS — already shivering in its boots over Edward R. Murrow’s war against McCarthyism — was given gutcheck after gutcheck by the pugnacious, principled, Harlem-raised Irishman that generations of impersonators would mock and history would largely pass over.

Sullivan’s show — broadcast on Sunday nights continuously from 1948-71 — has long been syndicated in clip show packages. Those half-hour doses of a one hour program that ran for 1068 episodes can still give viewers whiplash.

Jugglers and acrobats, singers and dancers, Broadway actors performing soliloquies, magicians and puppets “for the little ones,” comics and comic duos, Mahalia Jackson to The Rolling Stones, The Doors to Dionne Warwick would pass by in a blur, all of them, as “Sunday Best” reminds us, scouted, booked and showcased by the producer-star-impresario who was our host for the evening.

The eye-opening final film of the late documentarian Sacha Jenkins (“Louis Armstrong: Black and Blue”) focuses on the man behind that TV presence, “The Great Stone Face of 1949,” an underdog and outsider whose idea of “Americanism” included African Americans.

His progressive views on race showed up early as a sports columnist, and Sullivan’s voice is recreated reading from his columns railing against racist college football programs in the 1920s, and from his memoirs, puzzling over the state of race relations in America.

Sullivan was a columnist labeled by his newspaper “Mr. Broadway” and quickly earned enough notoriety to warrant a big screen showcase of Great White Way talent in 1933, a cinematic Broadway revue titled “Mr. Broadway” that he hosted. He emceed an annual Broadway “Harvest Moon Ball” showcase of performers he’d befriended in the 1930s and ’40s. One of those friends was the greatest tap dancer of his era, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

When CBS, starved for programming as its TV network began, broadcast one of those balls, Sullivan found himself offered a permanent show, “Toast of the Town.” Sullivan was determined that this “show maintain one point of view — mine.” And his point of view was talent-celebrating, inclusive and pretty much color blind.

With Black entertainers avoiding the racist south — Nat King Cole was assaulted during an Alabama concert — and most of the “Green Book” country they lived in ignoring them, especially on TV, Sullivan didn’t flinch as he brought Black singers like Eartha Kitt, jazzmen and vaudevillians like Cab Callowy and Black proto-rocker Bo Diddley into America’s living rooms via his show on the electronic hearth families gathered around Sunday nights.

“He had to have gotten a lot of flack,” Harry Belafonte remembers. Some of it came Sullivan tried to book the Harlem-born singer, actor and civil rights activist in the “Red Baiting” 1950s. CBS balked. Sullivan heard Belafonte out. CBS backed-down.

Sullivan’s role in showcasing Elvis and The Beatles put him at the top of the ratings, with almost half of America watching some nights. And it put Sullivan in the history books, albeit as a footnote. Jenkins’ film makes the case that there are other, even more important reasons to remember Sullivan.

Smokey Robinson and Dionne Warwick, Tito and Jackie Jackson and Motown chief Berry Gordy recall Sullivan’s life-and-career altering influence on their careers and the possibilities of their lives. Oprah Winfrey and others marvel at how the world changed for them when they saw “people who look like me,” comics, singers, dancers (Sammy Davis Jr. among them), on TV on that great melting pot of a program.

The trials of Civil Rights Movement Era America were the backdrop for these groundbreaking, ceiling-shattering appearances. Nat King Cole might be threatened in the South, but here’s Sullivan cheerleading “How about a big hand” for Cole, chatting with Cole on stage, showcasing his piano playing and singing.

Jenkins’ film lets us see Sullivan not-quite-single-handedly “normalizing” an integrated and “more perfect union” of a nation. We hear polite applause from the almost all-white studio audience, at Sullivan’s insistence when he introduced acts. He made a point of glad-handing, praising and inviting more applause after the performances.

He encouraged the performers, legitimized them. And he encouraged the rest of the country to broaden its tastes and its minds when he did.

The racist pushback against him and this show is recalled in all its ugliness. Again, you figure, CBS had guts back then. Then you hear Sullivan commenting on his temper. And you remember that anecdote Neal Gabler included in his biography of Sullivan’s most serious rival as a columnist and early TV influencer, Walter Winchell. Somebody once walked in on Sullivan holding the red-baiting, racist-when-it-suited-him Winchell’s head in a toilet in a Broadway theater.

I dare say some of the suits “handling” Ed were a little afraid of him.

Jenkins made his curtain call with a fine film and a grand appreciation of pop culture history. “Sunday Best” isn’t just nostalgic for those pre-streaming/pre-cable days of limited TV viewing choices, which could have a unifying effect on a diverse and often fractured culture. It’s a reminder of when civility, fair play and principles mattered, of when decent people of influence like Sullivan didn’t think twice about standing up to myopic bigots like Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge.

Back then, some people had guts, and one of them changed the country when he made CBS grow a pair and let him book his show based on the great American meritocracy. Because nobody knew talent and embraced “The Next Big Thing” better than Mr. “We’ve got a rilly big SHOOO for you tonight,” Ed Sullivan.

Rating: TV-14, some profanity

Cast: Ed Sullivan, Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick, Orpah Winfrey and Harry Belafonte.

Credits: Directed by Sacha Jenkins. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22