Vintage Black Glamour

Eartha Kitt, one of the reasons Vintage Black Glamour exists, was born 86 years ago today in North, South Carolina. In this photograph, she is shown at a cast party for “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952,” the show where she made her Broadway debut and sang, for the first time, her classic song, “Monotonous.” Photo: Museum of the City of New York

Lorraine Hansberry is captured by Gordon Parks chatting with the pianist at a party in honor of her play ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ at the now legendary Manhattan restaurant, Sardi’s in March 1959. Photo: Gordon Parks/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Nina Simone in her dressing room at the Village Gate in Manhattan before a live recording session in March 1965. Photo by Sam Falk/New York Times Co./Getty Images.

Janet Collins, the first Black prima ballerina at The Metropolitan Opera in her dressing room on the night of her debut, November 11, 1951. Ms. Collins, a cousin of Carmen de Lavallade, performed Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida” that night. She died in 2003 at the age of 86.

Do you ever get enough of Josephine Baker? I don’t! Here, she is in Christian Dior in March 1951, singing into a mic which conceals her hand-held corsage onstage at the Strand theater in New York during her US tour. Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.