People, Locations, Episodes

Willie Best, Actor born

*Willie Best, sometimes known as Sleep n’ Eat, was born on this date in 1916. He was a Black television and film actor. A native of Sunflower, Mississippi, William “Willie” Best came to Hollywood, California, as a chauffeur for a vacationing white couple. He decided to stay in the region and began his performing career with a traveling show in southern California. He […]

Jeni Le Gon, Dancer, and Actress born

*Jeni Le Gon was born on this date in 1916. She was an African American dancer and actress.

Born and raised near the south side of Chicago, her musical talents were developed on the street in neighborhood bands and musical groups. At the age of thirteen, buoyed by her brother who got a job touring as a singer and exhibition ballroom dancer, she landed her first job in musical theatre, dancing as a soubrette in pants, not pretty skirts. Le Gon trained at Mary Bruce’s School of Dancing.

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.

Raymond Steth, Graphic Artist born

*Raymond Steth was born on this date in 1917. He was a Black graphic artist. Raymond Ryles was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and his parents were Lulu Mann and Charles Ryles, a working-class farming family. He spent much of his childhood on a large farm in North Carolina, which would later influence his artwork. Rolando […]

Lena Horne, Singer, and Actress born

This date marks the birthday of Lena Horne in 1917. She was an African American singer and actress whose refusal to be cast in stereotypical roles helped transform the popular image of Black women.

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.

Hilda Simms, Actress, and Media Talent Advocate

This date in 1918 marks the birth of Hilda Simms. She was an African American stage and film actress.

Born Hilda Moses in Minneapolis, MN she graduated from South high school. Sims joined the American Negro Theater at Harlem, NY, in 1943, and was given the title role in Anna Lucasta. When the production moved to Broadway in 1944, it became the first all-Black production to be performed on Broadway without a racial theme. It had a run of over 950 performances.