Dance Theatre of Harlem founder Arthur Mitchell teaching a class at DTH, circa 1970s. Robert Garland, Resident Choreographer and Webmaster for The Dance Theater of Harlem, sent this picture to me last year. Robert is set to appear on the Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC show this morning (April 7th) around 11:30am EST to talk about the return of DTH to Harlem. I will add a link to the comment section once it is available.
Blanche Dunn, the chic Harlem Renaissance-era actress, photographed in Morningside Park in Harlem by her friend, Carl Van Vechten, in 1940. Ms. Dunn was essentially an “It” girl of the era: a mainstay at Van Vechten’s legendary parties and, as noted by the legendary Harlem Renaissance writer, painter Richard Bruce Nugent, “at all the Broadway first nights. A party was not a party, a place not a place, without Blanche”. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Guests at a breakfast party for Langston Hughes in 1925 including E. Franklin Frazier, Hubert Delany and Rudolph Fisher. hosted by Regina Anderson (Andrews) and Ethel Ray at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. Photo: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
Judy Pace and Godfrey Cambridge in a scene from the film ‘Cotton Comes To Harlem’ in 1970. The film, based on the Chester Himes novel of the same name, was co-written and directed by Ossie Davis. Photo by United Artists/Getty Images.
Jacquie “Tajah” Murdock is 82 and was a dancer at the Apollo Theater when she was 17-years-old. Today, she is the oldest model in Lanvin’s fall campaign, which features real people. Ms. Murdock told Ari Seth Cohen (who runs a fabulous blog featuring stylish older women called “Advanced Style) “This campaign is a dream come true. I grew up in Harlem always wanting to be a model, but in my day there were very little opportunities for women of color to work in fashion. At 18 I went from agent to agent looking for jobs, even as a hand model. I have finally made it and I will never give up. Hopefully some day I will get to Paris!”
A “Double V” campaign celebration in 1942 on 119th Street, between Lenox and 7th (now Malcolm X Blvd and Adam Clayton Powell Blvd) in Harlem. The Double V campaign was started in 1942, just as World War II began, by the Pittsburgh Courier, an historic African-American newspaper. “Double V” stood for “Victory Abroad and Victory at Home” and the purpose was to call continued attention to the legal injustices and segregation that Blacks dealt with as American citizens on American soil and as soldiers abroad within the (segregated) armed forces. To appreciate the role of the Pittsburgh Courier in this campaign, keep in mind that white newspapers did not cover Blacks unless there was a crime involved or, of course, if the Black in question was an athlete or an entertainer. White newspapers did not cover our births, deaths, weddings or any other slice of life-type activity that we did just like everyone else. That is why, in part, Ebony magazine was born. And they certainly did not report on racial discrimination (especially within the military where Black newspapers were banned from its libraries during the Double V Campaign) the way the Black press did.
Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert Delany (brother of the Delaney Sisters) overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem in the 1920s. Photo via the Schomburg Center.
Blanche Dunn, the exceedingly stylish Harlem Renaissance-era actress who was also a mainstay at Carl Van Vechten’s legendary parties which were, as Langston Hughes put it, “so Negro that they were reported as a matter of course in the colored society columns, just as though they occurred in Harlem instead of West 55th street. Carl Van Vechten, of course, is the photographer behind this photo (1941).
An Easter Sunday stroll by the Hotel Theresa in Harlem: Air Force Sergeant Harry Logan escorts his wife (right) and Jean Leonard, both of whom are in their Easter finery on April 13, 1952.
Photo: Bettman/Corbis
Winold Reiss: “Sari Price Patton,” 1925. Private collection. © The Reiss Partnership.
I came across Winold Reiss’ painting of this chic young woman at the wonderful exhibition “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” at the Brooklyn Museum. I love the Patton’s trendy page-boy haircut and her loose-fitting, low-waisted black silk gown and the yellow pleated ruffled tie and cuffs. She’s fashionable and youthful. She’s also black: You don’t see very many portraits of middle-class black women — or men — in many major museum shows, so I was intrigued.
There is very little info available on Sari Price Patton, but she was the hostess at a popular Harlem salon run by A’Lelia Walker. A patroness of black artists, including Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, Walker hosted black writers, sculptors, poets, painters, musicians and their friends at her house, serving food, champagne and gin. She and her friends decided to open a more formal salon, for conversation, poetry readings and art exhibitions, called ”The Dark Tower” (after the Countee Cullens poem). Yet the Dark Tower only lasted a year: partly because Walker had hoped to profit from the enterprise so started charging high prices the artists couldn’t afford. (The writer Bruce Nugent griped that “Colored faces were at a premium, the place filled to overflowing with with whites from downtown who had come up expecting that this was a new and hot nightclub.”*
But the club also lost money because our Sari Price Patton was caught embezzling some of the daily receipts. This was in 1927/1928, so before Reiss painted the chic young woman here.
* From “On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker” by A’Lelia Bundles
Painting from the Brooklyn Museum’s website
Winold Reiss: “Sari Price Patton,” 1925. Private collection. © The Reiss Partnership.
Via rlaneri: “I came across Winold Reiss’ painting of this chic young woman at the wonderful exhibition “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” at the Brooklyn Museum. I love the Patton’s trendy page-boy haircut and her loose-fitting, low-waisted black silk gown and the yellow pleated ruffled tie and cuffs. She’s fashionable and youthful. She’s also black: You don’t see very many portraits of middle-class black women — or men — in many major museum shows, so I was intrigued.
There is very little info available on Sari Price Patton, but she was the hostess at a popular Harlem salon run by A’Lelia Walker. A patroness of black artists, including Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, Walker hosted black writers, sculptors, poets, painters, musicians and their friends at her house, serving food, champagne and gin. She and her friends decided to open a more formal salon, for conversation, poetry readings and art exhibitions, called ”The Dark Tower” (after the Countee Cullens poem). Yet the Dark Tower only lasted a year: partly because Walker had hoped to profit from the enterprise so started charging high prices the artists couldn’t afford. (The writer Bruce Nugent griped that “Colored faces were at a premium, the place filled to overflowing with with whites from downtown who had come up expecting that this was a new and hot nightclub.”*
But the club also lost money because our Sari Price Patton was caught embezzling some of the daily receipts. This was in 1927/1928, so before Reiss painted the chic young woman here.
* From “On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker” by A’Lelia Bundles
Painting from the Brooklyn Museum’s website”
(via lascasartoris)
Marva Louis, a stenographer turned model and singer and the first wife of boxing legend Joe Louis (they married twice) stepping into a Duesenberg roadster in Harlem’s Sugar Hill on June 18, 1936. Hours later, her husband would lose to Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in one of the most famous bouts in boxing history. Langston Hughes described the reaction he witnessed after Louis suffered the only knockout during the prime of his career:
I walked down Seventh Avenue and saw grown men weeping like children, and women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.
Louis would go on to defeat Schmeling in a rematch on June 22, 1938. Photo via Bettman/Corbis
Harlem River 1930’s
©WaheedPhotoArchive, 2011
Glamorous people at the Harlem River, 1930’s.
