Why Black entertainment history?
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.
GLADYS BENTLEY (1907-1960) (also known as BOBBIE MINTON)
was a jazz and blues singer and performer during the Harlem Renaissance. She became one of the most successful and wealthy Black women of her time. She was also open and unapologetic about her sexuality, making her also one of the most successful out lesbian entertainers of the 1920s and 1930s. Bentley was a talented pianist and singer from a young age. She ran away from her hometown of Philadelphia at age 16 to New York City to pursue her musical career…and also to get away from a family environment that wanted to “cure” her.
She started out performing at rent parties and moved on to speakeasies and night clubs throughout Harlem. In between 1928 and 1929, Bentley released eight singles under Okeh Race records. She also had her own radio show in 1930. Her signature outfit was white and black top hat and tuxedo. She would perform in classic Harlem establishments like the Clam House and the Ubangi Club. She also would perform with a team of drag queens backing her vocals and dancing. Her lyrical content was frank and explicit for the time about sex and sexuality, so much so that midtown club King’s Terrace was padlocked for “dirty songs” after one of her performances. Bentley performed from the 1920s all the way through the 1940s. She passed away from the flu in 1960.
ALVIN AILEY (1931-1989)
was a dancer, director, activist, and choreographer who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, one of the most prominent dance companies globally, in 1958. Prior to that, he performed in Broadway shows, and he was a student of Lester Horton, founder of one of the few racially integrated dance companies in the United States. Upon Horton’s death, Ailey became the director of the Lester Horton Dance Theater and started creating his own works. His signature work, including “Cry” and “Revelations,” continue to be performed all over the world.
Ailey’s work incorporated elements of dance from primitive, modern, and jazz, as well as his memories of his Texas upbringing, Black life in America, and his never-ending drive for racial equity and equality. His performances would range from sorrowful requiems to joyful celebrations. Ailey passed away in 1989 from complications due to AIDS/HIV. In 2008, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was designated a vital American cultural ambassador of the world by US Congress. In 2014, Ailey was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his influential work in bringing dance to underserved communities.
JOSEPHINE BAKER (1906-1975)
was an American-born French singer, dancer, and WWII French Resistance agent. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, 1927’s Siren of the Tropics, and she is most famous for her headlining revues in the French cabaret scene. Her onstage persona is iconic of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. She has been dubbed the Black Venus and Black Pearl by other artists.
Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri and grew up in a racially mixed poor neighborhood. She moved to New York City at age 13 to pursue a career as a singer. During the Harlem Renaissance, she performed at the Plantation Club and was in a chorus line of a touring production of the Broadway revue Shuffle Along, which she maintained until the show’s closing in 1923. In 1925, Baker sailed to Paris to continue her career, and she became a national sensation. Baker was a household name in France by the end of the 1920s, but her fame sadly did not carry over to the United States as much as in France. Because of this, plus being barred from service at hotels, clubs, and restaurants in the US because of her race, Baker renounced her citizenship and became a permanent French national in 1937.
During WWII, Baker became a French Resistance agent, using both her celebrity status and the Axis powers’ underestimation of a Black woman to extract enemy intelligence and deliver it to neutral and allied occupied areas. For her efforts, After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a “Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur” by General Charles de Gaulle.
Despite renouncing her US citizenship, she was still a staunch supporter of civil rights and the 1960s movement. Baker was one of the only two women to speak at the March on Washington. The daughter of adopted parents, she cared deeply for orphaned children and adopted twelve kids over the years. She passed away at age 68 in 1975 due to a cerebral hemorrhage. Her funeral attracted 20,000 mourners. In 2021, Baker’s remains were interred in the Pantheon de Paris, making her only the sixth woman and first Black woman to receive the posthumous honor.
JOÃO FRANCISCO dos SANTOS (1900-1976) stage name MADAME SATÃ (Madame Satan)
was an Afro-Brazilian malandro (hustler), capoeirista, queer activist against police corruption, and drag performer. Dos Santos was born a formerly enslaved mother and a local landowner father in the northeast state of Pernambuco, just 12 years after the 1888 abolition of slavery in the country. When his father died, his desperate mother traded dos Santos, then 7 years old, for a mare to a horse trader who was looking for an apprentice.
He endured six months of conditions before running away with a woman who offered him work in a boarding house in Rio de Janeiro, settling in Lapa, the most infamous favela in the city at the time. Lapa was known for housing Brazil’s most bohemian “undesirables”: samba musicians, sex workers, gamblers, hustlers, and the like. A malandro took dos Santos under his wing to teach him the streets, and this was likely the person who taught him capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that was illegal at the time.
As dos Santos grew up, he was unapologetic about his same-sex attraction, and he also became a symbol of virile masculinity. Because he was Black, gay, poor, associated with people that society wished to sweep under the rug, and practiced a martial art that the government outlawed up until the late 1930s, dos Santos was an easy target for harassment.
Unbothered by the social target on his back, he advocated for his neighbors’ safety and spoke up about the harsh taxes levied by the police, the police responded with violence. Dos Santos defended himself, though, legendarily taking on twenty-four officers at once, breaking at least two officers’ limbs in one skirmish. At the same time, enchanted with the stage, dos Santos became a popular drag performer with the persona Madame Satã. Making him a bigger target for harassment. One night after a performance, he killed a law enforcer who attacked him for being gay. He received a 4-year prison sentence for that.
Dos Santos became both a gay icon for his drag performances and a symbol of virile masculinity for becoming the most respected malandro in Lapa. He even made his drag name his street name. By the time of his death in 1976, dos Santos would have fathered seven children and spent a total of 27 years in prison. SO proud was he that he kept his illness secret for as long as possible, and he was buried in his traditional malandro “uniform” of pristine white linen suit. Madame Satã became a symbol of a bygone era of bohemian Rio. He was also the subject of a feature-length film in 2002, entitled Madame Satã.
STORMÉ DE LARVERIE (1920-2014)
Often called the “Rosa Parks of the gay community” for her participation in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, she was always much more than that. Before the Rebellion, DeLarverie was a biracial NOLA-bourne performer. As a teenager, she joined the Ringling Brothers Circus where she rode jumping horses. After being injured in a fall from her performances, DeLarverie toured the black theater circuit as the MC of the Jewel Box Revue, the first racially integrated drag revue in North America from 1955 to 1969.
She was the only drag king in the circuit. DeLarverie drew inspiration from Dinah Washington and Billie Holliday with her singing style for the revue. The Jewel Box Revue was a hit with both Black and white audiences, even regularly performing at the Apollo. Thanks to her entertainment experience, DeLarverie was an expert in makeup and costuming, and she is considered to have a huge influence on gender-non-conforming fashion for women, long before unisex styles were even imagined.
After the Stonewall Uprising, she worked as a bouncer for various lesbian bars in New York City throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and she held several leadership positions in the Stonewall Veterans Association. DeLarverie also served the community as a volunteer street patrol worker, thereby being nicknamed the “guardian of lesbians in the Village.” Beyond her LGBTQ activism, DeLarverie also organized and performed at fundraisers for women who suffered from domestic violence and their children. DeLarverie suffered from a heart attack in her sleep in May 2014. Her legacy in Greenwich Village and beyond lives on.
WILLIAM ROSCOE LEAKE (1961-2006) (better known as WILLI NINJA)
was a dancer, choreographer, and considered the “Grandfather of Vogue”. Vogueing is a style of dance that was a fixture of Harlem ball culture, where ball-walkers would mix freezing and posing in elegant positions, as if posing for a Vogue magazine glamour shoot. Though not the inventor of Vogueing, the self-taught dancer is credited with refining the style and sharpening its movements. Ninja starred in the video for Malcolm McLaren’s 1989 song “Deep in Vogue”, and he was featured in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which spring boarded his career into doing paid performances and teaching dance.
Ninja danced in two of Janet Jackson’s videos for her classic album Rhythm Nation 1814, “Alright” and “Escapade”. He also worked as a runway model for Jen-Paul Gaultier, provided walk instructions for Paris Hilton, and performed in dance companies under Karole Armitage. Later in his career, he founded the Elements of Ninja modeling agency. The House of Ninja, which he founded in 1982, was known for being one of the few multiracial houses in the Ball scene. In its current iteration, the House of Ninja has over two hundred members worldwide. Willi Ninja passed away in at age 45 from AIDS related heart failure.
LENA WAITHE (b. 1984)
is a screenwriter, producer, and actor. She gained widespread popularity as a cast member in the Netflix comedy series Master of None, though the Chicago native’s entertainment roots run deeper than the show. She started out as an assistant to the executive producer of the sitcom Girlfriends, and after that became a writer for the Fox series Bones and Nickelodeon’s How to rock, and a producer for the film Dear White People. Waithe became the first Black woman to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 2017 with her semi-autobiographical Master of No episode “Thanksgiving”. The episode is hailed as poignant and beautiful, while still maintaining the signature comedy of Master of None.
After Master of None, Waithe went on to create three series for Showtime: The Chi, Boomerang, and Twenties. Waithe made her filmmaking debut as screenwriter and producer for the film Queen & Slim, and she is producer for the Amazon series Them, a controversial anthology horror that upturns the “Indian Burial Ground” trope by making the ghosts of white supremacists be the malevolent forces tormenting a Black family. No matter what her endeavors, Waithe is focuses on writing for and hiring more people of color and queer people in Hollywood to have their stories depicted.
Sources:
https://cadehildreth.com/who-is-lena-waithe/ https://www.hillmangrad.com/lena-waithe-bio-page
https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/willi-ninja
https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2018/7/20/madame-sat-the-ultimate-queer-archetype
https://www.alvinailey.org/alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater/alvin-ailey
About Chris Thompson
(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.
About Little Known Facts About (Black) American History
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.
