Happy 68th Birthday to the One, the Only, Diana Ross! #THEORIGINALBOSS
Photo (circa 1980s) by Douglas Kirkland/Corbis.
Happy 70th Birthday to The One and Only Aretha Franklin!
Diana Sands and Alan Alda on the February 1965 cover of @EBONYmag. They starred in the original Broadway production of “The Owl and the Pussycat” in 1964. The two-character play was originally written for white actors and after Diana originated the Broadway role, Japanese-American actress/singer Pat Suzuki starred in the national tour. Barbra Streisand, of course, would go on to star in the film version.
Diana said of her role at the time, “This is the first Broadway play in which I was cast as a person, rather than a racial type. I love doing it. When it’s over, the owl and the pussycat leave hand in hand to dance by the light of the moon.”
Ethel Waters
(Source: Beinecke Library)
Ethel Waters, half-nude by James Marquis Connely, circa 1920s. He also shot a famous nude of Harlem Renaissance notable Nora Holt.
Modeling pioneer Ophelia DeVore (right) with clients and friends (l-r) Joan Murry, Trudy Haynes, the Philadelphia news legend, actress and writer Ellen Holly and the great model Helen Williams. Photo via opheliadevore.com.
Cicely Tyson and modeling pioneer Ophelia DeVore disembarking from an airplane, probably in the early 1960s. Ms. Tyson, while doing a bit of modeling herself, trained models and actors at Ms. DeVore’s famous charm school. Photo via opheliadevore.com
Roland Hayes, the brilliant tenor who became the first African-American man to earn international fame as a concert vocalist, photographed by Addison Scurlock in 1940. Born to former slaves in Curryville, Georgia in 1887, he attended Fisk University and briefly toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Early in his career, he was turned down by talent managers because he was Black so, he invested in himself: He raised money and arranged and financed his own concert performances,which included Negro spirituals, lieder and arias by Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and Mozart. In 1942, Mr. Hayes’s wife, Helen and daughter, Afrika, sat in a whites-only area of a shoe store and were thrown out of the store. When Mr. Hayes defended his family, he was beaten and he and his wife were arrested - and the governor of Georgia was absolutely fine with it. The incident inspired Langston Hughes to compose the poem, Roland Hayes Beaten. Mr. Hayes would later teach at Boston University and would go on to celebrate more than 50 years on the concert stage before his death in 1977.
Jimi Hendrix having his hair done whilst reading Mad magazine.
My God… I’ve been looking for an excuse to put Jimi Hendrix up for the longest…
(via theswinginsixties)
Today, VBG hit 10,000 Facebook “likes” - thank you! To celebrate, I wanted to share the baddest picture I’ve seen all day. Found via Flickr and the Schomburg - Three Survivors of Reconstruction: M.W. Gibbs, a municipal judge in Arkansas, P.B.S. Pinchback, lieutenant governor of Louisiana and James Lewis, the collector of New Orleans port, circa 1922.
Dorothy Dandridge and actor Curd Jürgens (her co-star in 1958’s Tamango) enjoy hors d’oeuvres at a party thrown by producer Mike Todd (then-husband of Elizabeth Taylor) for his film “Around the World in Eighty Days” during the Cannes Film Festival in May 1957. Photo by Red Grandy, who has a great story about crashing the party to take this and other pictures.
Bill Cosby and Janet MacLachlan in a scene from “I Spy” in 1967. The episode, “Laya,” was about a “Central African Crisis” and Ms. MacLachlan played Laya, an African love interest to Mr. Cosby’s Alexander Scott. The episode is available in it’s entirety on Hulu. Photo via The Classic TV History Blog.
Arthur Mitchell teaching a class at his Dance Theater of Harlem, circa 1970s. Photo courtesy of The Dance Theater of Harlem.
