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It is my favorite writing time of the year. I get to write about African and African American history for Black History Month. I hope that this teaches and encourages readers to seek out more information than just my few twenty-eight highlights. Black history is everyone’s history. In the Western Hemisphere, our footprint is on the cornerstone of nearly all aspects of entertainment, for better or worse.
All genres of modern American music were directly influenced, if not completely invented, by Black folks. Black folks have been in mainstream theater and cinema for over a century, whether begrudgingly taking on roles that perpetuate negative stereotypes or taking a risk and carving out space to depict themselves truthfully. For this reason, I plan to highlight Black people’s contributions to entertainment.
Madame Sul-Te-Wan was a Black American actor whose career spanned over 50 years across a myriad of outlets. Her desire for the stage started as a young girl, when she would help her mother deliver laundry for actors of the Louisville stage scene. When she came of age, she moved to Cincinnati where she joined the Three Black Cloaks theatrical company. She also started her own touring companies before eventually moving to California to try her hand at the fledgling film industry.
Madame Sul-Te-Wan had the dubious honor of becoming the first Black woman to work under contract for a film. This film was titled D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. She was an accomplished character actor, but most of her roles were those of “mammy” characters, “native” women, or house cleaners. Despite that, she smoothly transitioned from silent films to talkies. Her most critically acclaimed role was in 1937’s Maid of Salem. She portrayed Tituba, the real-life enslaved woman whose case sparked the Salem Witch Trials. Eventually, she played Hagar (Carmen’s grandmother), opposite Dorothy Dandridge, in Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones. Madame Sul-Te-Wan suffered a stroke and passed away on February 1, 1959, at the age of eighty-five. She was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1986.
Oscar Micheaux was an author and film producer, often regarded as the first major African American filmmaker. Micheaux produced over forty feature films from the 1910s up to 1948. His contribution to cinema was primarily during the era of “race films.” Race films were cinema created by Black people outside of major Hollywood producers. His first piece of work was his 1913 novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. It was loosely autobiographical, depicting the tribulations of a Black homesteader in the west (which he was) and lifestyles of Black urban life. This novel would be the blueprint for his first film in 1918, entitled The Homesteader. The film was about a Black pioneer who falls in love with the “wrong” woman, is accused of murder, and eventually finds true love at the end.
Most of his films dealt heavily with race and interracial relationships in society. They also dealt with African American everyday life. Micheaux’s characters were more developed than merely being butts of jokes or nominal servant roles which was the norm in mainstream Hollywood. They were seen pursuing higher education or professional vocational training, seeking love, and going about their lives. All with the real-life issues of segregation, mob violence, and economic exploitation serving as a backdrop. While blazing his own path adjacent to Hollywood establishment, he made the path easier for future Black and Brown entertainers. Micheaux passed away from heart failure on March 25, 1951. He was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and was honored by the Directors Guild of America, among other accolades. His work is noted in the 2014 documentary The Czar of Black Hollywood.
Race Film was a genre of film that developed parallel to the growing mainstream Hollywood film industry. Unlike mainstream movies, race films were written, cast, produced, and directed by Black people. They also specifically targeted Black audiences. Black studios like Lincoln Motion Picture Company and Micheaux Film Corporation emerged to drive race film production. However, many of the films were still produced by white producers, knowing that the Black community were viable consumers. No matter the financier source, depictions of Black characters were much more in depth than simply being comic relief or the background servant or the criminal/predator.
Black people in race films had personalities, goals, and developed story arcs. Black social mobility, self-improvement, and intra-racial tension between educated and non-educated Black folks were common themes in the films. Common tropes like Black ghettos, poverty, social injustice were usually avoided or only used as a backdrop or plot device. Race film venues would often be exclusive to segregated theaters in the South, or as late night or matinee screenings in integrated theatres. Between 1905 and 1955, approximately five hundred race films were produced. Due to lack of preservation and time, only about one hundred remain.
Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black American woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Dandridge was born in Cleveland, OH to Ruby, an entertainer herself, and Cyril Dandridge, a carpenter and minister. Her mother created a song and dance routine for Dorothy and her sister Vivian, giving them the stage name “The Wonder Children”. When work dried up in Cleveland, the trio moved to Hollywood. There, Ruby could find steady work in small film roles and on radio. The Wonder Children were renamed the Dandridge Sisters and teamed up with a young Etta James. The Dandridge Sisters garnered so much attention that they booked famous night clubs like the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club. They also appeared in films The Big Broadcast of 1936, It Can’t Last Forever, and Marx Brothers film A Day at the Races.
Dandridge’s solo foray into film was difficult, as she refused to play stereotypical Black roles. Her first credited role was that of a murderer in a film called Four Shall Die. She also depicted the fictional Queen Melmedi of Ashuba in Tarzan’s Peril. This role caused a bit of controversy, as her one-shoulder dress was considered provocative at the time. In most of Dandridge’s roles, she was able to marry her singing and dancing roots with acting. She played in musicals or depicted club singers, and famously played the title role in Carmen Jones, an all-black cast version of Bizet’s Carmen.
At the height of her career, Dandridge was the first Black woman sex symbol of Hollywood. Dandridge passed away on September 8th, 1965, either from an embolism from a foot fracture or an antidepressant overdose. Black stars of today credit Dorothy Dandridge for her contribution in early Hollywood and in breaking down racial barriers.
Sidney Poitier was a Bahamian American Academy Award winning actor, director, and activist. He spent his first 15 years of his life supporting his family farm on Cat Island. He later went to live with extended family in Miami. Poitier couldn’t stand the Jim Crow racism of Florida, and moved to New York City in hopes of becoming an actor.
He paused his goal by enlisting in the US Army in 1943 to work with psychiatric patients at a Veteran’s Administration hospital. Incensed by the way patients were treated, he feigned mental illness and was discharged from his duty in 1944. Poitier joined the American Negro Theatre and was eventually cast as lead in a Broadway production of Lysystrata. His first major Hollywood role was in 1949, playing Dr. Luther Brooks in the film No Way Out. Not only was this role unique in that it portrayed a Black man as a doctor, but it also was one of few times that a Black man in power would strike a white man.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Poitier would play lead and supporting roles alongside prominent white actors of the time. He also pushed barriers of social morays, like having an interracial love affair with Diahann Carroll in Paris Blues and confronting lynching and racial violence as a detective in In the Heat of the Night. Beyond the screen, Poitier worked with his friends and colleagues to push for civil rights. He raised money for and attended the March on Washington in 1963. A year later, he worked with Harry Belafonte in 1964 to raise $70,000 for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Greenwood, Mississippi. While en route to deliver the money, they were chased and nearly run off the road by klansmen/police, but they successfully got the money to its destination.
Poitier’s show business career led him to the director’s chair. He helmed nine films, including Uptown Saturday Night, Stir Crazy, and Fast Forward. Throughout his career, his goal was always to depict and exalt the Black man as a person deserving respect and recognition, no matter his station in life. He passed away on January 6th, 2022.
Harold George Bellanfanti Jr, better known as Harry Belafonte, is a singer, actor, producer, and activist. He was born in Harlem to Jamaican parents. He is considered an icon of the folk music scene of the 1950s. Belafonte’s premiere LP in, Calypso (1956), was the first platinum selling LP by a single artist.
Belafonte spent his youth between Jamaica and the United States. When he came of age in the 1940s, he joined the US Navy to fight in WWII. After his service, he worked in New York City as a janitor. He received the acting bug when a client tipped him with tickets to the American Negro Theater, and he fell in love with performance art. Already a talented vocalist, he became a local club singer to finance his acting classes. His first live vocal performance was backed by the Charlie Parker Band, which included Parker, Max Roach, and Miles Davis.
As his star rose, Belafonte would release four more albums that would at least make the Billboard top forty. He hosted TV specials alongside Julie Andrews, and he even guest hosted The Tonight Show for a week in February 1968, where he interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy. Outside of the recording studio, Belafonte was a popular movie star, starring in Carmen Jones, Bright Road, and Island in the Sun, among others. Like Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge, he refused to take on roles that negatively stereotyped people of color.
Throughout his career Belafonte was an avid human rights activist, citing Paul Robeson as somewhat of a mentor. He was close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr, and he and friend Sidney Poitier often raised money and participated in civil actions and throughout the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. He interwove his career with his activism by producing performances to raise funds for grassroots organizations. When performing on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Belafonte performed a number while intercutting footage from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. CBS censored the segment. Belafonte has spread his activism to world health and hunger, and he has often been critical of US foreign policy. Belafonte received numerous humanitarian awards, and for his acting and singing, his is an EGOT recipient.
The Apollo Theatre of Harlem is an over 100-year-old landmark and birthplace of hundreds of Black entertainers’ careers. The theatre has been a headquarters for movements from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. The theater was built in 1914 in neo-classical architectural style on 253 West 125th Street, Harlem’s primary commercial area.
It was initially a burlesque theater named Hurtig and Seamon’s (named after the lease holders). Ironically, its doors used to be closed to African Americans who were starting to populate the Upper West Side neighborhood due to the Great Migration. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s 1933 campaign against burlesque cause the theater to shut down. It was bought by Sidney Cohen, who renamed it the Apollo theater and opened its doors to all. Under his ownership, the theater became a hub for musical and variety revues, including the famous Amateur Night contests.
The Apollo became a main hub for the Chitlin Circuit, a series of venues up and down the East Coast and the South targeted to African Americans. It was a vital stop for any burgeoning popular entertainer. Nearly every major Black musical act performed there, and also a few white acts like Buddy Holly. However, most of the white performers were booked because they were assumed to be Black.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the management would alternate live stage shows with B movies (allegedly to clear the house). By the 1960s, The Apollo Theater was such a respected jewel of the community that it was left untouched during all the instances of Civil unrest in the 1960s. In 1983, the Apollo Theater was officially designated an historical landmark, and in 1991, the Apollo Theater Foundation was established as a private non-profit organization to manage the venue. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Sammy Davis Jr., James Brown, Gladys Knight, Luther Vandross, D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, and others started their careers on the stage. It has also been a stop for political figures, like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. It remains a staple of Harlem to this day.
(he/his/him) Chris Thompson is an engineer, writer, comedian, and activist who made Rochester, New York his home in 2008. In addition to his role as Contributor for 540Blog he currently writes and regularly posts on his own on Instagram and Twitter at @ChronsOfNon. Chris is also a regular contributor for Rochester City Newspaper. His blog is www.chroniclesofnonesense.com.
Little Known Facts About (Black) American History is an annual blog campaign curated by 540WMain that has a mission to promote and share little known facts about Black Americans everyday throughout the month of February. Now in its 5th year the campaign highlights the life and work of past and present day Black Americans that are overlooked or underrepresented in our conversations about American history.
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