People, Locations, Episodes

Orson Welles, Stage and Film Director born

*Orson Welles was born on this date in 1915. He was a white-American director, actor, screenwriter, and producer. George Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was the son of Richard Head Welles and Beatrice Ives Welles. His parents separated and moved to Chicago in 1919. His father, who made a fortune as an […]

Hughie Lee-Smith, Florida Artist born

*Hughie Lee Smith was born on this date in 1915,. He was an African American artist.

From Eustis Florida, his parents were Luther and Alice Williams Smith. Later he changed his last name to Lee-Smith after he and his art school classmates decided Smith was too ordinary a name for a distinguished painter. Lee-Smith began drawing at a very early age. Shaped by the Great Depression and the WPA artists of the late 1930s, Lee-Smith’s earliest work was fired by social concerns and longing for a better, more democratic ideal for the future of America.

Lawrence Winters, Opera Vocalist born

*Lawrence Winters was born on this date in 1915.  He was a Black opera singer with an active international career from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s.   Lawrence Lafayette Whisonant was from King’s Creek, South Carolina.  He began to study singing privately before entering Howard University in 1941, where he studied singing with Todd Duncan. After […]

Claude Clark, Artist born

*Claude Clark was born on this date in 1915. He was a Black painter, printmaker, and art educator. Claude Clark was born on a tenant farm in Rockingham, Georgia. In early August 1923, Clark’s parents left the South for a better life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the Great Migration. Clark attended Roxborough High School, where […]

The Lafayette Players Debut

*On this date in 1915, the Lafayette Players debuted their first stage production.  Anita Bush founded the Lafayette Players, a dramatic stock company composed entirely of African American actors.  Originally from Harlem, this first-of-its-kind group introduced audiences to the idea that Black actors could take on various roles and display a much greater range than previously considered […]

Alice Childress, Playwright, and Actress born

On this date in 1920, Alice Childress was born. She was an African American playwright, novelist, and actress. She was known for her realistic stories about the lasting optimism of Black Americans.

She was born in Charleston, SC, and grew up in Harlem, New York City, where she studied drama with the American Negro Theater in the 1940s. There she wrote, directed, and starred in her first play, “Florence” (1949), a dramatic piece about a black woman who, after meeting an insensitive white actress in a railway station, comes to respect her daughter’s attempts to pursue an acting career.

Earl Cameron, British Actor born

*Earl Cameron was born on this date in 1917. He was an Afro Caribbean Black British actor. Earlston Jewett Cameron was born in Pembroke, Bermuda, and grew up on Princess Street, Hamilton, UK. His father was a stonemason who died in 1922, after which Cameron’s mother took on various jobs to support the family. As […]

Claudia McNeil, Actress born

*Claudia McNeil was born on this date in 1917. She was an African American actress.

Isabel Sanford, Actress born

*On this date in 1917 Isabel Sanford was born. She is an African American actress.

From New York City, Sanford’s life story is the type that those in show business enjoy because it gives the struggling artist hope. After education in New York, she joined the Star Players (later the American Negro Theater) in the 1930s. Sanford worked with them until World War II started and the theater temporarily split up. After the war, Sanford had home obligations that put her career on hold. But her husband’s death was inspiration for Sanford’s dream.

Jacob Lawrence, Artist and Educator born

Jacob Lawrence, an African American artist and educator, was born in this date in 1917. Lawrence was among the best-known 20th century African American painters, a distinction he shared with Romare Bearden.

Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, NJ, and was 13 when he moved with his family to New York City. Lawrence was only in his 20s when his “Migration Series” made him nationally famous. The series depicted the epic Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the 20th century.

Rose Piper, Artist born

*Rose Piper was born on this date in 1917.  She was a Black painter best known for her semi-abstract, blues-inspired paintings of the 1940s. Rose Theodora Piper was born Rose Theodora Sams in New York. She grew up in the Bronx, where her father taught Latin and Greek as a public school teacher. She attended Hunter College, majoring in art and […]

Beryl McBeurnie, Dancer, and Instructor born

*Beryl McBurnie was born on this date in 1917. She was a Trinidadian dancer, instructor and administrator.

Butterbeans and Susie, Vaudeville Pioneer Performers

*Butterbeans and Susie are celebrated on this date in 1917. They were a Black 20th-century comedy Vaudeville team. They were comprised of Jodie Edwards and Susie Edwards (née Hawthorne). They married in 1917 and performed together until the early 1960s. Their act, a combination of marital quarrels, comic dances, and racy singing, proved popular on the Theatre Owners Booking […]

Margaret Burroughs, Writer, and Teacher born

*Margaret Burroughs was born on this date in 1917. She was an African American artist, historian, teacher and writer.

Ossie Davis, Actor, and Activist born

Ossie Davis was born on this date in 1917. He was an African American actor, writer, producer, director, and a “giant of civil rights.”

Raiford Chatman Davis (his birth name) was the oldest of five children born to Laura Cooper and Kince Davis in Cogden, GA. He picked up his nickname others mistook his mother’s articulation of his initials, “R.C” as “Ossie.” He headed for Howard University, where he studied under drama critic Alain LeRoy Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar. Davis began his career as a writer and an actor with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem in 1939.