A rare find on Twitter today via @DandridgeDaily, audio of Dorothy Dandridge introducing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. circa 1963. You know I’m going to look into this further, right?
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.
Todd Duncan, the pioneering opera singer, circa 1930s. Mr. Duncan was the first African-American to perform with a major opera company, the New York City Opera. Other career highlights include being selected by George Gershwin to originate the role of Porgy in “Porgy and Bess” and being the first person to record the now classic song, “Unchained Melody.” Mr. Duncan also held a master’s degree from Columbia University and taught voice at Howard University for over fifty years, well into his nineties. He died in 1998.
Mary Lou Williams at a 1942 jam session at the studio of LIFE magazine photographer Gjon Mili. Mili hosted several legendary jam sessions with jazz icons throughout the 1940s. Photo: TIME & LIFE Pictures
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.
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Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poiter in Paris Blues, 1961.
There’s an electrical storm overhead in London. I’ve decided to stay out the rain and watch Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poiter in Paris Blues on youtube here.
Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poitier in Paris Blues (full version!!!) 1961) Watch NOW while you can. You know how YouTube is…
(Source: deforest)
Melba Roy, NASA Mathmetician, 1964. I don’t know much about orbital element timetables, but I love that the computations of a gracious lady in pearls helped produce them (by which millions saw the satellite from Earth as it passed overhead). Ms. Roy headed a group of NASA mathmeticians known as “computers” who tracked the Echo satellites in 1964. Photo: NASA/Corbis
Paul Robeson, majestic singer and actor, brilliant scholar and athlete, fierce political activist and all-around renaissance man, was born on this day in 1898. He is seen here in 1925 in a photo by the famed British photographer Alex Stewart Sasha. Photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.
Marian Anderson, singing during an Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939. The concert was broadcast on the radio across the nation and the integrated audience of 75,000 including members of the Supreme Court, Congress, and President Roosevelt’s cabinet. The concert was organized after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Ms. Anderson to sing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. solely because of her race. Photo via The Library of Congress.
A’Lelia Mae Perry (Bundles), great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker and daughter of Mae Walker, with her AKA sorors at Howard circa 1946. Ms. Perry is third from the right on the front row. Photo courtesy of her daughter, A’Lelia Bundles.
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)
Vintage Black Glamour remembers the great artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett, who died at her home in Mexico on April 2, 2012. She is pictured here circa 1949 in a photo by Mariana Yampolsky.
