Dance icon Katherine Dunham smiles at the legendary shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo as she tries on a few pairs of his shoes in Florence in 1950. Photo: David Lees/Corbis.
Grace Jones turns 65 today! In this 1989 photo by Roxanne Lowit, she is with the late great fashion designer, Patrick Kelly and legendary models Iman and Naomi Campbell.
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska 88 years ago today in 1925. He would later change his name to El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. In this photo from March 1964, he is shown with Muhammad Ali outside of the Trans-Lux Newsreel Theater in New York City after a screening of a film about Mr. Ali’s title fight with Sonny Liston. Photo: AP/Corbis.
Brilliant scholar, activist and author Angela Davis, photographed in 1973 by the legendary photographer Philippe Halsman. Filmmaker Shola Lynch Free Angela has just released an AMAZING documentary about the iconic Ms. Davis. Photo: Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos.
Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis compare notes, and the tools of their respective trades, on June 14, 1946 during Mr. Robinson’s visit to Mr. Louis’s training camp in Pompton Lake, New Jersey. It was 66 years ago today, on April 15, 1947, that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Photo: Bettman/Corbis.
Marvin Gaye was born 74 years ago today in Washington, DC. He is in Detroit in this 1971 photo shooting the cover for his iconic “What’s Going On” album. Photo: Jim Hendin
(via soulofmotown)
Richetta Randolph Wallace, circa 1930. She was private secretary to Mary White Ovington, a writer, suffragist and one of the founders of the NAACP. She was also private secretary to James Weldon Johnson, attorney, poet, author (“Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man) and composer of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”) and the executive secretary of the NAACP, Walter White. Born in Virginia in 1884, Ms. Randolph moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in 1933 and remained until her death in 1971. Photo: Brooklyn Historical Society
Elisabeth Welch, the American singer who introduced the “Charleston” on Broadway before becoming a superstar in England, in 1935. Born in Manhattan in 1904 to a Scottish-Irish mother and African American father, Ms. Welch was a favorite of iconic composers Noël Coward and Cole Porter. She was the first singer to popularize the classic Porter tune, “Love for Sale” and it would become a signature song in her career. She also introduced “Stormy Weather” to British audiences and would be so beloved there, she remained for the rest of her life. Ms. Welch, among other career highlights in her 70-year career, was nominated for a Tony award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical in 1986 at age 82, for her role in “Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood.” Ms. Welch also starred in two films with Paul Robeson, “Song of Freedom” in 1936 and “Big Fella” in 1937. In the comment section, I am linking a fantastic short video (1:56) of Ms. Welch singing “Harlem in my Heart” from “Big Fella” and Mr. Robeson can be seen in the clip. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London.
Actor Graham Brown, pictured on one of his actor composite photos from the 1960s. Born Robert Elwood Brown in Harlem on October 24, 1924, Mr. Brown was an actor whose career spanned more than five decades. A World War II veteran, he began acting in Army shows before enrolling in college at Howard University, where he was a member of the Howard University Players theater group and graduated in 1949. Over the last few months, I have had the honor of analyzing and organizing Mr. Brown’s personal collection of photographs, papers and other historically and culturally relevant ephemera, for donation to a major institution on behalf of his family. I could hardly believe my eyes at some of the things I held in my hands in the Harlem office where I spent hours examining Mr. Brown’s collection: a personal letter to Mr. Brown from Harold Jackman, a prominent Harlem Renaissance figure. Mr. Brown’s Howard Players member card, programs from their plays, and a photo of them in Norway at the home of the Norwegian ambassador, surrounding him at his piano in 1949. There are pages and pages of Mr. Brown’s writing: attempts at poems, short stories, English homework and drafts of articles he wrote for Howard’s school newspaper, “The Hilltop” and copies of the actual newspapers. There are Columbia University bursar’s receipts from 1952 (he briefly attended graduate school there) and show programs, posters, tickets, letters and photos from much of his life and career. Mr. Brown was a member of the Negro Ensemble Company, where he worked with actors such as Roxie Roker (his Howard classmate) in “The River Niger,” Laurence Fishburne and Esther Rolle. He was also in several productions of the Greenwich Mews Theater, a theater famous for it’s integrated productions in the 1950s and a member of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. In the 1960s and 1970s, made several appearances on Broadway (Gore Vidal’s “Weekend”) and with Joseph’s Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, including “The Black Picture Show” in 1975. His film credits included “Malcolm X,” “Clockers,” “Sanford & Son,” and “Law & Order.” Mr. Brown died on December 13, 2011 at the age of 87.
There are versatile artists, and then there is Geoffrey Holder. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad in 1930, Mr. Holder danced with his brother Boscoe’s dance troupe as a child. He arrived in New York in 1952 at the invitation of the legendary choreographer, Agnes de Mille and, to pay his fare, he sold 20 of his paintings. He would go on to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting in 1957. A few years before, he was a principal dancer at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and appeared on Broadway in Truman Capote’s “House of Flowers,” where he would meet his wife of 57 years, the dancer Carmen de Lavallade.
In 1975, Mr. Holder won 2 Tony Awards in the same evening for directing and choreographing the Broadway musical, “The Wiz.” He is best known to most for his film and commercial roles: as Baron Samedi in the 1973 James Bond film, “Live and Let Die” and of course, as the “Un-cola Man” in the ubiquitous 1970s 7-Up commercials. Mr. Holder is still painting and creating art today and, the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago currently has an exhibition featuring Mr. Holder and Ms. de Lavallade. In this picture, Mr. Holder is sitting in front of one of his painting, sometime in the 1960s. Photo: Bradley Smith/Corbis.
Pioneering educator Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961) sometime in the 1910s. Born in Orange, Virginia, Ms. Burroughs graduated with honors from the Colored High School, which would later become M Street School and then Dunbar High School. Best know as the founder of the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls, Ms. Burroughs was an early advocate for teaching African American History and students had to pass a course in black history in order to graduate. A member of the National Association of Colored Women among other civic and religious advocacy groups, Ms. Burroughs was appointed to a special committee on African Americans and housing by President Herbert Hoover. Also a leader in religion, she helped found the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention.
Ms. Burroughs also had a special connection to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. A longtime friend of his parents, Ms. Burroughs wrote a letter to Dr. King’s mother, Mrs. Alberta King on February 4, 1956 during the course of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and told her how impressed she was with the “calm, sure way that Junior is standing up for right and righteousness.” Photo: The Library of Congress
British contralto Evelyn Dove (1902-1987) wearing a mantilla and holding a fan in a photography by Carl Van Vechten taken on December 27, 1935. Born in London to a barrister from Sierra Leone and his British wife, Ms. Dove’s career took her all over the world, from American jazz clubs to cabarets from Paris to India. She was best known to most for her work in BBC radio broadcasts in the 1940s. In 1956, she portrayed Eartha Kitt’s mother in a BBC television drama called “Mrs. Patterson,” that starred the American-born British-based singer, Elisabeth Welch. She also appeared on stage in London’s West End in a production of Langston Hughes’s “Simply Heavenly.” Photo: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
