Whats Buzzing in the Streets – Page 77

Sarah Breedlove

Sarah Breedlove (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919), known as Madam C. J. Walker, was an African American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a political and social activist. Eulogized as the first female self-made millionaire in America, she became one of the wealthiest African American women in the country, “the world’s most successful female entrepreneur of her time,” and one of the most successful African-American business owners ever.

Walker made her fortune by developing and marketing a line of beauty and hair products for black women through Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the successful business she founded. Walker was also known for her philanthropy and activism. She made financial donations to numerous organizations and became a patron of the arts. Villa Lewaro, Walker’s lavish estate in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, served as a social gathering place for the African American community.

Breedlove was born on December 23, 1867, near Delta, Louisiana, to Owen and Minerva (Anderson) Breedlove. Sarah was one of six children, which included an older sister, Louvenia, and four brothers: Alexander, James, Solomon, and Owen Jr. Breedlove’s parents and her older siblings were enslaved on Robert W. Burney’s Madison Parish plantation, but Sarah was the first child in her family born into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Her mother died, possibly from cholera, in 1872; her father remarried, but he died within a few years. Orphaned at the age of seven, Sarah moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the age of ten and worked as a domestic. Prior to her first marriage, she lived with her older sister, Louvenia, and brother-in-law, Jesse Powell.

In 1882, at the age of fourteen, Sarah married Moses McWilliams, possibly to escape mistreatment from her brother-in-law. Sarah and Moses had one daughter, Lelia McWilliams, born on June 6, 1885. When Moses died in 1887, Sarah was twenty; Lelia was two years old. Sarah remarried in 1894, but left her second husband, John Davis, around 1903 and moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1905.

In January 1906, Sarah married Charles Joseph Walker, a newspaper advertising salesman she had known in Missouri. Through this marriage, she became known as Madam C. J. Walker. The couple divorced in 1912; Charles died in 1926. Lelia McWilliams adopted her stepfather’s surname and became known as A’Lelia Walker.

In 1888 Sarah and her daughter moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, where three of her brothers lived. Sarah found work as a laundress, barely earning more than a dollar a day, but she was determined to make enough money to provide her daughter with a formal education. During the 1880s, Breedlove lived in a community where ragtime music was developed—she sang at the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church and started to yearn for an educated life as she watched the community of women at her church. As was common among black women of her era, Sarah experienced severe dandruff and other scalp ailments, including baldness, due to skin disorders and the application of harsh products such as lye that were included in soaps to cleanse hair and wash clothes. Other contributing factors to her hair loss included poor diet, illnesses, and infrequent bathing and hair washing during a time when most Americans lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity.

Initially, Sarah learned about hair care from her brothers, who were barbers in Saint Louis. Around the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World’s Fair at St. Louis in 1904), she became a commission agent selling products for Annie Turnbo Malone, an African American hair-care entrepreneur and owner of the Poro Company. While working for Malone, who would later become Walker’s largest rival in the hair-care industry, Sarah began to adapt her knowledge of hair and hair products to develop her own product line.

In July 1905, when she was thirty-seven years old, Sarah and her daughter moved to Denver, Colorado, where she continued to sell products for Malone and develop her own hair-care business. Following her marriage to Charles Walker in 1906, she became known as Madam C. J. Walker and marketed herself as an independent hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. (“Madam” was adopted from women pioneers of the French beauty industry.) Her husband, who was also her business partner, provided advice on advertising and promotion; Sarah sold her products door to door, teaching other black women how to groom and style their hair.

In 1906 Walker put her daughter in charge of the mail order operation in Denver while she and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern United States to expand the business. In 1908 Walker and her husband relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they opened a beauty parlor and established Lelia College to train “hair culturists.” After closing the business in Denver in 1907, A’lelia ran the day-to-day operations from Pittsburgh, while Walker established a new base in Indianapolis in 1910. A’lelia also persuaded her mother to establish an office and beauty salon in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in 1913.

In 1910 Walker relocated her business to Indianapolis, where she established the headquarters for the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. She initially purchased a house and factory at 640 North West Street. Walker later built a factory, hair salon, and beauty school to train her sales agents, and added a laboratory to help with research. She also assembled a competent staff that included Freeman Ransom, Robert Lee Brokenburr, Alice Kelly, and Marjorie Stewart Joyner, among others, to assist in managing the growing company. Many of her company’s employees, including those in key management and staff positions, were women.

To increase her company’s sales force, Walker trained other women to become “beauty culturists” using “The Walker System”, her method of grooming that was designed to promote hair growth and to condition the scalp through the use of her products. Walker’s system included a shampoo, a pomade stated to help hair grow, strenuous brushing, and applying iron combs to hair. This method claimed to make lackluster and brittle hair become soft and luxurious Walker’s product line had several competitors. Similar products were produced in Europe and manufactured by other companies in the United States, which included her major rivals, Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro System and later, Sarah Spencer Washington’s Apex System.

Between 1911 and 1919, during the height of her career, Walker and her company employed several thousand women as sales agents for its products. By 1917 the company claimed to have trained nearly 20,000 women. Dressed in a characteristic uniform of white shirts and black skirts and carrying black satchels, they visited houses around the United States and in the Caribbean offering Walker’s hair pomade and other products packaged in tin containers carrying her image. Walker understood the power of advertising and brand awareness. Heavy advertising, primarily in African American newspapers and magazines, in addition to Walker’s frequent travels to promote her products, helped make Walker and her products well known in the United States. Walker became even more widely known by the 1920s as her business market expanded beyond the United States to Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama, and Costa Rica.

In addition to training in sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how to budget, build their own businesses, and encouraged them to become financially independent. In 1917, inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, Walker began organizing her sales agents into state and local clubs. The result was the establishment of the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents (predecessor to the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America). Its first annual conference convened in Philadelphia during the summer of 1917 with 200 attendees. The conference is believed to have been among the first national gatherings of women entrepreneurs to discuss business and commerce. During the convention Walker gave prizes to women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new sales agents. She also rewarded those who made the largest contributions to charities in their communities.

As Walker’s wealth and notoriety increased, she became more vocal about her views. In 1912 Walker addressed an annual gathering of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) from the convention floor, where she declared: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there, I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground.” The following year she addressed convention-goers from the podium as a keynote speaker.

Walker helped raise funds to establish a branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Indianapolis’s black community, pledging $1,000 to the building fund for the Senate Avenue YMCA. Walker also contributed scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Institute. Other beneficiaries included Indianapolis’s Flanner House and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church; Mary McLeod Bethune’s Daytona Education and Industrial School for Negro Girls (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach, Florida; the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina; and the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Georgia. Walker was also a patron of the arts.

About 1913 Walker’s daughter, A’Lelia, moved to a new townhouse in Harlem, and in 1916 Walker joined her in New York, leaving the day-to-day operation of her company to her management team in Indianapolis. In 1917 Walker commissioned Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black architect in New York City and a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, to design her house in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Walker intended for Villa Lewaro, which cost $250,000 to build, to become a gathering place for community leaders and to inspire other African Americans to purse their dreams. She moved into the house in May 1918 and hosted an opening event to honor Emmett Jay Scott, at that time the Assistant Secretary for Negro Affairs of the U.S. Department of War.

Walker became more involved in political matters after her move to New York. She delivered lectures on political, economic, and social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. Her friends and associates included Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. During World War I Walker was a leader in the Circle For Negro War Relief and advocated for the establishment of a training camp for black army officers. In 1917 she joined the executive committee of New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which organized the Silent Protest Parade on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The public demonstration drew more than 8,000 African Americans to protest a riot in East Saint Louis that killed thirty-nine African Americans.

Profits from her business significantly impacted Walker’s contributions to her political and philanthropic interests. In 1918 the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC) honored Walker for making the largest individual contribution to help preserve Frederick Douglass’s Anacostia house. Prior to her death in 1919, Walker pledged $5,000 (the equivalent of about $65,000 in 2012) to the NAACP’s antilynching fund. At the time it was the largest gift from an individual that the NAACP had ever received. Walker bequeathed nearly $100,000 to orphanages, institutions, and individuals; her will directed two-thirds of future net profits of her estate to charity.

Walker died on May 25, 1919, from kidney failure and complications of hypertension at the age of fifty-one. Walker’s remains are interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.

At the time of her death Walker was considered to be the wealthiest African American woman in America. She was eulogized as the first female self-made millionaire in America, but Walker’s estate was only worth an estimated $600,000 (approximately $8 million in present-day dollars) upon her death. According to Walker’s New York Times obituary, “she said herself two years ago [in 1917] that she was not yet a millionaire, but hoped to be some time.” Her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, became the president of the Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.

Walker’s personal papers are preserved at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis. Her legacy also continues through two properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places: Villa Lewaro in Irvington, New York, and the Madame Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis. Villa Lewaro was sold following A’Lelia Walker’s death to a fraternal organization called the Companions of the Forest in America in 1932. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has designated the privately-owned property a National Treasure. Indianapolis’s Walker Manufacturing Company headquarters building, renamed the Madame Walker Theatre Center, opened in December 1927; it included the company’s offices and factory as well as a theater, beauty school, hair salon and barbershop, restaurant, drugstore, and a ballroom for the community. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

In 2006, playwright and director Regina Taylor wrote The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, recounting the history of Walker’s struggles and success. The play premiered at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Actress L. Scott Caldwell played the role of Walker.

On March 4, 2016, skincare and haircare company Sundial Brands launched a collaboration with Sephora in honor of Walker’s legacy. The launch, titled “Madam C.J. Walker Beauty Culture”, comprised four collections and focused on the use of natural ingredients to care for different types of hair.

Written by Dianne Washington

Frank Morgan

Frank Morgan (December 23, 1933 – December 14, 2007) was a jazz saxophonist with a career spanning more than 50 years. He mainly played alto saxophone but also played soprano saxophone. He was known as a Charlie Parker successor who primarily played bebop and ballads.

Frank Morgan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1933, but spent most of his childhood living with his grandmother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin while his parents were on tour. Morgan’s father Stanley was a guitarist with Harlan Leonard and the Rockets and The Ink Spots, and his mother, Geraldine, was a 14-year-old student when she gave birth to him. Morgan took up his father’s instrument at an early age, but lost interest the moment he saw Charlie Parker take his first solo with the Jay McShann band at the Paradise Theater in Detroit, Michigan. Stanley introduced them backstage, where Parker offered Morgan advice about starting out on the alto sax, and they met at a music store the following day. Morgan, seven years old at the time, assumed they’d be picking out a saxophone, but Parker suggested he start on the clarinet to develop his embouchure. Morgan practiced on the clarinet for about two years before acquiring a soprano sax, and finally, an alto. Morgan moved to live with his father (by that time divorced) in Los Angeles, California at the age of 14, after his grandmother caught him with marijuana.

As a teenager Morgan had opportunities to jam with the likes of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray on Sunday afternoons at the Crystal Tearoom. When he was just 15 years old, Morgan was offered Johnny Hodges’s spot in Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, but Stanley deemed him too young for touring. Instead he joined the house band at Club Alabam where he backed vocal luminaries such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. That same year he won a television talent-show contest, the prize of which was a recording session with the Freddy Martin Orchestra, playing “Over the Rainbow” in an arrangement by Ray Conniff, with vocals by Merv Griffin. Morgan attended Jefferson High School during the day, where he played in the school big band that also spawned jazz greats Art Farmer, Ed Thigpen, Chico Hamilton, Sonny Criss, and Dexter Gordon. Morgan stayed in contact with Parker during these years, finding himself in jam sessions at Hollywood celebrities’ homes when Parker visited L.A. In 1952, Morgan earned a spot in Lionel Hampton’s band, but his first arrest in 1953 prevented him from joining the Clifford Brown and Max Roach quintet (that role went instead to Harold Land, and later, Sonny Rollins). He made his recording debut on February 20, 1953 with Teddy Charles and his West Coasters in a session for Prestige Records. This sextet featured short-lived tenor player Wardell Gray and was included on the 1983 posthumous release Wardell Gray Memorial Volume 1. On November 1, 1954, Morgan cut five tracks with the Kenny Clarke Sextet for Savoy Records, four of which were released with Clarke billed as the leader, with “I’ve Lost Your Love” credited to writer Milt Jackson as leader. Morgan recorded an all-star date with Wild Bill Davis and Conte Candoli on January 29, 1955 and participated in a second recording session on March 31, 1955 with Candoli, Wardell Gray, Leroy Vinnegar and others, which were combined and released in 1955 as Morgan’s first album, Frank Morgan, by GNP Crescendo Record Co.. Later releases also included five tracks cut at the Crescendo Club in L.A. on August 11, 1956 with a sextet featuring Bobby Timmons and Jack Sheldon. The album copy hailed Morgan as the new Charlie Parker, who had died the same year. In his own words, Morgan was “scared to death” by this and “self-destructed.”

Following in the footsteps of Parker, Morgan had started taking heroin at 17, subsequently became addicted, and spent much of his adult life in and out of prison. Morgan supported his drug habit through check forgery and fencing stolen property. His first drug arrest came in 1955, the same year his debut album was released, and Morgan landed in San Quentin State Prison in 1962, where he formed a small ensemble with another addict and sax player, Art Pepper. His final incarceration, for which Morgan had turned himself in on a parole violation, ended on December 7, 1986. Though he stayed off heroin for the last two decades of his life, Morgan took methadone daily.

Fresh out of prison in April, 1985, Morgan started recording again, releasing Easy Living on Contemporary Records that June. Morgan performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 21, 1986, and turned down an offer to play Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s film Bird (Forest Whitaker took his place). He made his New York debut in December 1986 at the Village Vanguard, and collaborated with George W.S. Trow on Prison-Made Tuxedos, a semi-autobiographical Off-Broadway play which included live music by the Frank Morgan Quartet (featuring Ronnie Mathews, Walter Booker, and Victor Lewis). His 1990 album Mood Indigo went to number four on the Billboard jazz chart. Morgan suffered a stroke in 1998, but subsequently recovered, recording and performing during the last four years of his life. HighNote Records eventually released three albums worth of material from a three-night stand at the Jazz Standard in New York City in November, 2003. Morgan also participated in the 2004 Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square Park.

After moving to Minneapolis in the fall of 2005, Morgan headlined the 2006 Twin Cities Hot Summer Jazz Festival and played duets with Ronnie Mathews at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis and George Cables at the Artists’ Quarter in St. Paul. Morgan also performed at the 2006 East Coast Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C., and on the West Coast at Yoshi’s and the Catalina. His last gig in Minneapolis featured Grace Kelly, Irv Williams, and Peter Schimke at the Dakota on July 1, 2007. For one of Morgan’s final recordings, he composed and recorded music for the audiobook adaptation of Michael Connelly’s crime novel The Overlook (2007), providing brief unaccompanied sax solos at the beginning and end of the book, and between chapters.

Shortly before his death, Morgan completed his first tour of Europe.

Frank Morgan died in Minneapolis on Friday, December 14, 2007 from complications due to colorectal cancer, two days before his 74th birthday. A memorial service featuring members of Morgan’s family and a performance by Irv Williams was held at the Artists’ Quarter on Sunday, December 23.

Warren “Baby” Dodds

Warren “Baby” Dodds (December 24, 1898 – February 14, 1959) was a jazz drummer born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is regarded as one of the very best jazz drummers of the pre-big band era, and one of the most important early jazz drummers. He varied his drum patterns with accents and flourishes, and he generally kept the beat with the bass drum while playing buzz rolls on the snare. Some of his early influences included Louis Cottrell, Sr., Harry Zeno, Henry Martin, and Tubby Hall. Dodds was among the first drummers to be recorded who improvised while performing.

“Baby” Dodds was the younger brother of clarinetist Johnny Dodds. His mother, who died when he was nine years old, taught him valuable lessons about persistence and putting one’s whole effort into endeavors, and he carried these with him through his career as a jazz drummer. He was born into a very musical family. His father and uncle played violin and his sister played harmonica. In addition, his father was religious and the family regularly sang hymns together. Dodds, in his autobiography The Baby Dodds Story, told the story of making his first drum: “I took a lard can and put holes in the bottom and turned it over and took nails and put holes around the top of it. Then I took some rounds out of my mother’s chairs and made drumsticks out of them”. At age 16, Dodds saved up enough money to buy his own drum set. Although Dodds had several paid teachers during his early years as a drummer, various jazz drummers around New Orleans also influenced him. He started playing in street parades around New Orleans with Bunk Johnson and his band and then got a job playing in Willie Hightower’s band, the American Stars.

The band played in various venues around New Orleans, and Dodds recalls hearing many musicians along the way, including Buddy Bolden, John Robichaux, and Jelly Roll Morton. He played with several different outfits including those of Frankie Duson and Sonny Celestin, and he was part of the New Orleans tradition of playing jazz during funeral marches. Dodds describes this experience in his autobiography: “The jazz played after New Orleans funerals didn’t show any lack of respect for the person being buried. It rather showed their people that we wanted them to be happy”.

Dodds gained reputation as a top young drummer in New Orleans. In 1918, Dodds left Sonny Celestin’s outfit to play in Fate Marable’s riverboat band. A young Louis Armstrong also joined the band, and the two of them were on the boats for three years (from 1918 to 1921). The band played on four different boats, and usually left New Orleans in May and travel to St. Louis, though they also sometimes traveled further north. They played jazz, popular, and classical music while on the boats.

Dodds and Armstrong left Fate Marable’s band in 1921 due to a disagreement about musical style, and Dodds soon joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. At this time, the personnel in Oliver’s band were Joe “King” Oliver on cornet, Baby Dodds’ brother Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Davey Jones on alto saxophone, Honoré Dutrey on trombone, Lil Hardin on piano, Jimmie Palao on violin, and Eddie Garland on bass fiddle.

They moved to California in 1921 to work with Oliver there, and they played together for about fifteen months. In 1922, the band, excepting Garland, Palao, and Jones, followed Oliver to Chicago, which would be his base of operations for several years. They began playing at the Lincoln Gardens, and Louis Armstrong also joined this outfit. Dodds describes playing with this band as “a beautiful experience”. Dodds recorded with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Art Hodes, and his brother Johnny Dodds. Dodds played in Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven groups. In May 1927 Armstrong recorded with the Hot Seven, which consisted of Johnny Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr, Lil Hardin Armstrong, John Thomas, Pete Briggs, and Baby Dodds. From September to December 1927 the Hot Five Armstrong assembled consisted of Johnny Dodds, Kid Ory, Johnny St. Cyr, Lonnie Johnson, and Baby Dodds.

After the Oliver band broke up, the Dodds brothers played at Burt Kelley’s Stables in Chicago, and soon after, Johnny Dodds began leading his own outfit, of which Baby was a part. Johnny Dodds died of a stroke in 1940. Of his brother, Baby Dodds said the following: “There just couldn’t be another Johnny Dodds or anyone to take his place. And his passing on made a big difference in my life. I had been connected with him for many years and from then on I had to be wholly on my own”.

After his brother’s death, Baby Dodds worked mostly as a freelance drummer around Chicago. This was the time of the New Orleans Revival, which was a movement in response to the emerging style of bebop. Many jazz traditionalists wanted jazz to return to its roots during this time. Dodds, having remained a New Orleans style drummer untouched by the influence of swing, found himself playing a role in the New Orleans jazz revival. In 1941, he played with Jimmie Noone and his band for a short time. This band featured Mada Roy on piano, Noone on clarinet, Bill Anderson on bass, and Dodds on drums. Dodds stayed with this outfit for only three months before they went to California, while Dodds decided to stay in Chicago. In the late 1940s he worked at Jimmy Ryan’s in New York City. On some of his trips back to New Orleans, he recorded with Bunk Johnson. Dodds ended up playing with Johnson’s band in New York. Dodds described his impressions of New York as a place where people listened to jazz rather than danced to it: “When I first went to New York it seemed very strange to have people sitting around and listening rather than dancing. In a way it was similar to theatre work. But it was peculiar for me because I always felt as though I was doing something for the people if they danced to the music”. After playing with several outfits in New York, he joined Mezz Mezzrow’s group on a tour of Europe in 1948 that lasted eight weeks. The group ended up playing solely in France, and Dodds had a great experience, saying that Europeans “take our kind of music much more seriously than they do in our own country”. They played at the Nice Festival along with Rex Stewart, Louis Armstrong, and several other American jazz musicians. Dodds returned to Chicago after the European tour and while taking a trip to New York in April 1949, he suffered a stroke. In 1950 he had his second stroke and in 1952 suffered a third. After his three strokes, Dodds tutored and played in public as much as he could, though he was unable to complete entire performances. He died on February 14, 1959 in Chicago.

Written by Dianne Washington

Seminole Indians

On this date in 1831, during the Second Seminole War, a force of Seminole Indians defeated U.S. troops in the Battle of Okeechobee in Florida.

Chief John Horse (a Black man) shared command with Alligator Sam Jones and Wild Cat. Blacks had a reputation as “fearless” fighters in the numerous battles with U.S. troops. Blacks also served with the American troops as scouts, interpreters, and even spies. In 1849, the U.S. attorney general’s office ruled that Black Seminoles were slaves by law. The U.S. government actively promoted slavery among relocated Native American tribes.

Even tribes who had never practiced slavery before were encouraged to do so. It was in the same year that John Horse founded the city of Wewoka in Oklahoma. It served as a refuge for runaway slaves.

Written by Dianne Washington

Willie Reed

Willie Reed did not know Emmett Till, the young black man whose murder in the Mississippi Delta became one of the most infamous lynchings in the history of the Jim Crow South. Mr. Reed saw him only once — on Aug. 28, 1955, during the last hours of Till’s life — in the back of a green and white Chevrolet pickup truck.

Mr. Reed, an African American sharecropper, risked his life at 18 to appear as a surprise witness in the prosecution of the white men accused of the crime. He became the momentary hero of the Till trial, an event that helped spur the civil rights movement but left a moral stain on the American legal system.

Mr. Reed died July 18, 2013 at a hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. He was 76, and he had lived in Chicago under a different name — first in secrecy and later in relative obscurity — since fleeing Mississippi for his safety nearly 60 years ago. For decades, he had worked as a hospital orderly.

Written by Dianne Washington

Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert

Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (December 24, 1853 – c. 1890) was an African-American author and biographer. She documented slavery in the United States through a collection of interviews with ex-slaves in her book The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. She was a Black teacher and writer.

Octavia Victoria Rogers was born in Oglethorpe, Georgia, where she lived in slavery until the Emancipation. Like millions of freed blacks, she had a deep yearning for learning and eventually she studied to be a teacher at Atlanta University. This steady young woman was as serious about being a stalwart Christian as she was about being a sterling teacher. While still living in Oglethorpe, she joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was led by the legendary Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.

Like many of her contemporaries, Rogers saw teaching as a form of worship and Christian service. Her first teaching job was in Montezuma, Georgia. There, in 1874, she married another teacher at this school, A.E.P. Albert, who later became an ordained minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Soon after their marriage, the Alberts moved to Houma, Louisiana, where she began conducting interviews with men and women who were once enslaved. These interviews were the raw material for what became her gifted collection of narratives, “The House of Bondage,” or “Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves.” Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert did not live to see “The House of Bondage” reach the public.

It was shortly after her death in 1890 that the New Orleans-based Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper, the “Southwestern Christian Advocate” serialized the work from January to December 1890.

Written by Dianne Washington

Jabbo Smith

Jabbo Smith, born as Cladys Smith (December 24, 1908 – January 16, 1991) was an American jazz musician, known for his virtuoso playing on the trumpet.

Jabbo Smith was born in Pembroke, Georgia. He was the son of a barber and a church organist. After his father died, Smith and his mother moved to Savannah when he was four. His mother found it increasingly difficult to care for him and at age six he was placed into the Jenkins Orphanage Home in Charleston, but she found employment in the Home in order to be near to him.

The Jenkins Home placed heavy emphasis on music education and it was in this setting that Smith took up trumpet and trombone at the age of eight and began touring the country with a student band at the age of ten.

Smith left The Jenkins Home at the age of 16 and headed north to make his mark on music. He kept a promise to his mother never to work for less than $100 dollars a week. Smith found employment in a number of top bands, the most important of which were Charlie Johnson’s Paradise Ten. This group included arranger Benny Carter on alto and Duke Ellington. Smith played on the 1927 recording of Black and Tan Fantasy. He turned down an offer to join the Ellington Orchestra that same year because of money.

Smith was stranded in Chicago in 1929 while on the road with “Keep Shufflin'” following the gangland killing of Arnold Rothstein, the financier of the show. Smith then formed his Rhythm Aces, a quintet with whom he recorded nineteen songs in 1929. These works attracted the attention of Roy Eldridge, who adopted some of Smith’s speed into his own playing. Toward the end of the 1930s, Smith gradually withdrew from serious music activity. He led a group for a while at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and gigged in a Newark club called the Alcazar.

It was there that he encouraged a 17-year-old Newark singer who sat in at the Alcazar from time to time to enter a talent show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She won and got her start. The Singer, The Divine One, was Sarah Vaughn.

From there Smith moved to Milwaukee where he married, did some local playing, and enjoyed the security of a steady job with a car rental agency, fading away into quiet oblivion for 20 years. Around 1960, Smith recorded two albums, and in 1979, was a guest artist in the musical One Mo’ Time.

He also made appearances at several jazz festivals, toured Europe, and performed at the West End Cafe, the Bottom Line, and the Village Vanguard, all in New York. One of his last public performances was in Berlin in 1986.

Jabbo Smith died in January of 1991 at age 82.

Written by Dianne Washington

Cab Calloway

Cabell “Cab” Calloway III (December 25, 1907 – November 18, 1994) was a jazz singer and bandleader. He was strongly associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City, where he was a regular performer.
Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States’ most popular big bands from the start of the 1930s through to the late 1940s. Calloway’s band featured performers including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon “Chu” Berry, New Orleans guitar ace Danny Barker, and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86.

Calloway was born in Rochester, New York, on Christmas Day in 1907. The family relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, his parents’ hometown, in 1918. His mother, Martha Eulalia Reed, was a Morgan State College graduate, teacher and church organist. His father, Cabell Calloway, Jr., was a graduate of Lincoln University of Pennsylvania in 1898 and worked as a lawyer and in real estate.

Cab Calloway spent his adolescent years growing up in West Baltimore’s Sugar Hill, considered the political, cultural and business hub of black society. There he grew up comfortably in a middle-class household. Early on, his parents recognized their son’s musical talent and he began private voice lessons in 1922. He continued to study music and voice throughout his formal schooling. Despite his parents’ and teachers’ disapproval of jazz, Calloway began frequenting and performing in many of Baltimore’s nightclubs. As a result he came into contact with many of the local jazz luminaries of the time. He counted among his early mentors drummer Chick Webb and pianist Johnny Jones.

After his graduation from Frederick Douglass High School, Calloway joined his older sister, Blanche, in a touring production of the popular black musical revue, Plantation Days. (Blanche Calloway became an accomplished bandleader before her brother did, and he would often credit her as his inspiration for entering show business.) His parents had hopes of their son becoming an attorney following after his father, so Calloway enrolled in Crane College. His main interest, however, was in singing and entertaining, and he spent most of his nights at the Dreamland Ballroom, the Sunset Cafe, and the Club Berlin, performing as a drummer, singer, and MC. At the Sunset Café, Cab cut his teeth as an understudy for singer Adelaide Hall and it was here that he met and performed with Louis Armstrong who taught him to sing in the “scat” style. He eventually left school to sing with a band called the Alabamians.

The Cotton Club was the premier jazz venue in the country, and Calloway and his orchestra (he had taken over a brilliant, but failing band called “The Missourians” in 1930; later on, the band changed its name to Cab Calloway and His Orchestra) were hired as a replacement for the Duke Ellington Orchestra while they were touring (he joined Duke Ellington and Mills Blue Rhythm Band as another of the jazz groups handled by Irving Mills). Calloway quickly proved so popular that his band became the “co-house” band with Ellington’s, and his group began touring nationwide when not playing the Cotton Club. Their popularity was greatly enhanced by the twice-weekly live national radio broadcasts on NBC at the Cotton Club. Calloway also appeared on Walter Winchell’s radio program and with Bing Crosby in his show at New York’s Paramount Theatre. As a result of these appearances, Calloway, together with Ellington, broke the major broadcast network color barrier.

Like other bands fronted by a singing bandleader, Calloway initially gave ample soloist space to its lead members and, through the varied arrangements of Walter “Foots” Thomas, provided much more in the way of musical interest. Many of his records were “vocal specialities” with Calloway’s vocal taking up the majority of the record.

In 1931 he recorded his most famous song, “Minnie the Moocher”. That song, along with “St. James Infirmary Blues” and “The Old Man of the Mountain”, were performed for the Betty Boop animated shorts Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow White (1933), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933), respectively. Through rotoscoping, Calloway not only gave his voice to these cartoons, but his dance steps as well. He took advantage of this and timed his concerts in some communities with the release of the films in order to make the most of the attention. As a result of the success of “Minnie the Moocher,” he became identified with its chorus, gaining the nickname “The Hi De Ho Man”. He also performed in a series of short films for Paramount in the 1930s. (Calloway and Ellington were featured on film more than any other jazz orchestras of the era.)

In these films, Calloway can be seen performing a gliding backstep dance move, the precursor to Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk”—Calloway said 50 years later, “it was called The Buzz back then.” The 1933 film International House featured Calloway performing his classic song, “Reefer Man,” a tune about a man who favors marijuana cigarettes.

Calloway made his “first proper Hollywood movie appearance” opposite Al Jolson in The Singing Kid in 1936. He sang a number of duets with Jolson, and the film included Calloway’s band and cast of 22 Cotton Club dancers from New York. According to music historian Arthur Knight, the film aimed in part “to both erase and celebrate boundaries and differences, including most emphatically the color line.” He also notes that “when Calloway begins singing in his characteristic style – in which the words are tools for exploring rhythm and stretching melody – it becomes clear that American culture is changing around Jolson and with (and through) Calloway….”

Calloway’s was one of the most popular American jazz bands of the 1930s, recording prolifically for Brunswick and the ARC dime store labels (Banner, Cameo, Conqueror, Perfect, Melotone, Banner, Oriole, etc.) from 1930 to 1932, when he signed with RCA Victor for a year. He was back on Brunswick in late 1934 through 1936, when he signed with manager Irving Mills’s short-lived Variety in 1937, and stayed with Mills when the label collapsed and the sessions were continued on Vocalion through 1939, and then OKeh Records through 1942. After a recording ban due to the 1942-44 musicians’ strike ended, he continued to record prolifically.

Calloway’s vocal style is a blend of hot scat singing and improvisation coupled with a very traditional vaudeville-like singing style. Many of his ballads are devoid of tone bending jazz styling.

In 1941 Calloway fired Dizzy Gillespie from his orchestra after an onstage fracas erupted when Calloway was hit with spitballs. He wrongly accused Gillespie, who stabbed Calloway in the leg with a small knife.

In 1943 Calloway appeared in the high-profile 20th Century Fox musical film Stormy Weather. Stormy Weather was one of the first films that featured an all-star black cast.

In 1944 The New Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive was published, an update of an earlier book in which Calloway set about translating jive for fans who might not know, for example, that “kicking the gong around” was a reference to smoking opium.

Calloway and his band starred in Hi-De-Ho (1947), an all-black full-length film directed by Josh Binney. Caricatures of Calloway appeared in the Porky Pig cartoons Porky at the Trocadero and Swooner Crooner.

The band also formed its own barnstorming baseball and basketball teams during the 1930s, starring Calloway, Milt Hinton, Chu Berry, Benny Payne and Dizzy Gillespie.

In the late 1940s, Calloway wrote a regular humorous pseudo-gossip column called “Coastin’ With Cab” for Song Hits Magazine. It was a collection of celebrity snippets such as this one, in the May 1946 issue: “Benny Goodman was dining at Ciro’s steak house in New York when a very homely girl entered. ‘If her face is her fortune,’ Benny quipped, ‘she’d be tax-free’.” In the late 1940s, however, Cab Calloway’s bad financial decisions as well as his gambling caused his band to break up.

In the 1950s Calloway moved his family from Long Island, New York, in order to raise the three youngest of his five daughters in Greenburgh, New York.

In his later career Calloway appeared in a number of films and stage productions that used both his acting and singing talents. In 1952 he played the prominent role of “Sportin’ Life” in a production of the Gershwin opera, Porgy and Bess, with William Warfield and Leontyne Price as the title characters. Another notable role was “Yeller” in The Cincinnati Kid (1965), with Steve McQueen, Ann-Margret, and Edward G. Robinson.

Calloway appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on March 19, 1967, with Chris Calloway. In 1967, Calloway co-starred opposite Pearl Bailey as Horace Vandergelder in an all-black cast change of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway during its original run. It revived the flagging business for the show and RCA released a new cast recording, rare for the time. In 1973–74, Calloway was featured in an unsuccessful Broadway revival of The Pajama Game alongside Hal Linden and Barbara McNair. 1976 saw the release of his autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (Crowell). It included his complete Hepsters Dictionary as an appendix.

Calloway attracted renewed interest in 1980 when he appeared as a supporting character in the film The Blues Brothers, performing “Minnie the Moocher”, and again when he sang “The Jumpin’ Jive” with the Two-Headed Monster on Sesame Street. This also was the year the cult movie Forbidden Zone was released, which included rearrangements of, and homages to, Calloway songs written by Calloway fan Danny Elfman, performed by Elfman and his band, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

Calloway helped establish the Cab Calloway Museum at Coppin State College (Baltimore, Maryland) in the 1980s, and Bill Cosby helped establish a scholarship in Calloway’s name at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

In 1985, Cab and his Orchestra appeared at The Ritz London Hotel where he was filmed for a 60-minute BBC TV show called The Cotton Club comes to the Ritz that also had Adelaide Hall, Doc Cheatham, Max Roach, and the Nicholas Brothers appearing on the bill.

In 1986, Calloway appeared at World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)’s WrestleMania 2 as a guest judge for a boxing match between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Mr. T that took place at the Nassau Coliseum. Also in 1986, Calloway headlined to great success a gala ball for 4,000 celebrating the grand opening of one of the top hotels in the U.S. at the time, the Dallas-based Rosewood Hotel Co.’s Hotel Crescent Court in Dallas, Texas.

In 1990, he was the focus of Janet Jackson’s 1930s-themed music video “Alright”, and he made a cameo appearance at the end playing himself. In the United Kingdom, he also appeared in several commercials for the Hula Hoops snack, both as himself and as a voice for a cartoon (in one of these commercials he sang his hit “Minnie The Moocher”). He also made an appearance at the Apollo Theatre.

Cab enjoyed his final years as a celebrated and well loved member of a retirement community in northern Delaware (between, and short train rides from, his beloved Baltimore and New York City), such that, in 1994, a creative and performing arts school, the Cab Calloway School of the Arts, was dedicated in his name in Wilmington, Delaware.

On June 12, 1994, Calloway suffered a severe stroke. He died five months later on November 18, 1994. His body was cremated and his ashes were given to his family. Upon the death of his wife Zulme “Nuffie” Calloway on October 13, 2008, his ashes were interred next to her at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

A profile of Calloway, Cab Calloway: Sketches, aired on the PBS program American Masters in February 2012.

Written Dianne Washington

O’Kelly “Kelly” Isley Jr.

O’Kelly “Kelly” Isley Jr. (December 25, 1937 – March 31, 1986) was an American singer and one of the founding members of the family group The Isley Brothers.

The eldest of the Isley Brothers, Kelly Isley started singing with his brothers at church. When he was 16, he and his three younger brothers (Rudy, Ronnie and Vernon) formed The Isley Brothers and toured the gospel circuit. Following the death of Vernon Isley from a road accident, the brothers decided to try their hand at doo-wop and moved to New York to find a recording deal. Between 1957 and 1959, the Isleys would record for labels such as Teenage and Mark X. In 1959, they signed with RCA Records after a scout spotted the trio’s energetic live performance.

O’Kelly and his brothers co-wrote their first significant hit, “Shout”. While the original version only peaked at the top 50 of the Hot 100, subsequent versions helped the song sell over a million copies. Later moving on to other labels including Scepter and Motown, the brothers would have hits with “Twist & Shout” in 1962 and “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)”. In 1959, the Isley family had relocated to Englewood, New Jersey where Kelly stayed with his mother and younger siblings.

In 1969, the brothers left Motown and started their own label, T-Neck Records, where they would write the majority of their recordings, including “It’s Your Thing”. Kelly and his brother Rudy began to take some lead spots on the group’s albums starting with the It’s Our Thing album in 1969. The track, “Black Berries”, from their The Brothers: Isley album, was dedicated to Kelly, who Ron would always quote him as saying “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice”. That saying had been originated by Harlem Renaissance novelist Wallace Thurman in the 1929 novel, The Blacker the Berry. After the inclusion of younger brothers Ernie and Marvin and brother-in-law Chris Jasper, Kelly, Rudy and Ron didn’t write as much as they did in the past but in an agreement shared parts of the composition credits as they owned the songs’ publishing.

Kelly Isley during the Isleys’ 1970s heyday was usually photographed wearing a cowboy hat and Western type of clothing. According to his brother Ernie, it was Kelly who discovered a homeless Jimi Hendrix after hearing of Hendrix’s talents as a guitarist and helped him get a job with the brothers’ band and allowed to live in his mother’s house. In 1985 the brothers released the Masterpiece album. It is Kelly who sings most of the lead of the Phil Collins ballad, “If Leaving Me Is Easy”, on the album with Ron backing him up. Kelly’s last appearance as member of the Isley Brothers was in 1986 on the song “Good Hands” from the Wildcats soundtrack.

A heavyset man, Kelly contracted cancer and lost weight, which was shown on the group’s album cover of Masterpiece. In March 1986, Kelly suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 48 in his Alpine, New Jersey home leaving behind two sons, Frank and Doug. He is buried in George Washington Memorial Park in Paramus, New Jersey.

The Isley Brothers’ follow-up record following Kelly’s death, Smooth Sailin’, was dedicated to him and featured their tribute song, “Send a Message”.

Written by Dianne Washington

Joseph Bologne

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (December 25, 1745 – June 10, 1799) was a champion fencer, virtuoso violinist, and conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris. Born in Guadeloupe, he was the son of George Bologne de Saint-Georges, a wealthy planter, and Nanon, his African slave. During the French Revolution, Saint-Georges was colonel of the Légion St.-Georges, the first all-black regiment in Europe, fighting on the side of the Republic. Today the Chevalier de Saint-Georges is best remembered as the first classical composer of African ancestry.

Boulogne was born on the West Indies island of Guadeloupe, where his mother Nanon was a slave. Boulogne’s father was a Frenchman, George de Bologne Saint-Georges. He owned the plantation on which Joseph spent his early childhood. The word “Chevalier” means “Knight” in French. It was a title of nobility in the Kingdom of France. Joseph could not inherit his father’s status as a member of the nobility because his mother was an African.

Even so, he was called “Chevalier de Saint-Georges” from a young age. At age 10, Saint-Georges moved to France with his parents. There he continued his studies in classical music. He was tutored in violin by Jean-Marie Leclair, and studied composition with Francois-Joseph Gossec. Saint-Georges also spent six years at the boarding school of Texier de La Boessiere, a master of arms. Athletics and fencing brought him a reputation at an early age. He swam across the River Seine in winter with one arm tied behind his back. As an adult he signed his surname “Saint-George” and that became the normal spelling in French. Saint-George’s’ military career began in 1761 as an officer in the King’s Guard.

In his music career, the conductor of the prestigious Le Concert des Amateurs orchestra chose Saint-Georges as First Violin in 1769. Saint-Georges made his public debut as a violin soloist during the 1772-73 concert season, performing his own violin concertos. Many say that Saint-Georges demonstrated the influence of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He has even been called “Le Mozart Noir” or “The Black Mozart.” History shows that Mozart came to Paris in 1778 to study the ”Paris School” of composition while Saint-Georges was a member.

In 1775, Queen Marie-Antoniette appointed Saint-Georges as her music director, and King Louis XVI named him director of the Paris Opera. Saint-Georges was also the first person of African descent to join a Masonic Lodge in France. He was initiated in Paris to “Les 9 Soeurs,” a Lodge belonging to the Grand Orient of France.

As a conductor, he later traveled to Vienna and commissioned Franz Joseph Haydn to compose the Paris Symphonies, Nos. 82-87, which premiered in 1787. No. 85, called The Queen, was a favorite of Marie-Antoniette.

Saint-Georges joined the pro-Revolution National Guard in 1789. That same year the Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued by the National Assembly. On Sept. 7, 1792, a delegation of men of color asked the National Assembly to allow them to fight in defense of the Revolution and its egalitarian ideals. On the next day the Assembly, authorized the Légion des Hussards Américains [Legion of American Soldiers], which had 1,000 volunteers of color, with Saint-Georges as their colonel. One of its squadron leaders was Alexandre Dumas Davy de La Pailleterie (1762-1806). Like his colonel, he was the son of a French aristocrat and an African slave. He later had a son, Alexander Dumas, who wrote “The Three Musketeers.”

On September 25, 1793, Saint-Georges lost his command due to false charges of misusing public funds. He spent 18 months in the house of detention at Houdainville before being acquitted. After his release Saint-Georges took part in the Haitian Revolution.

Saint-Georges produced 14 violin concertos and 9 symphonies between 1773 and 1785. He wrote 2 solo violins, 2 symphonies, 3 sonatas for violin and harpsichord, and 18 string quartets divided into 3 collections of 6 quartets in each. Saint-Georges also composed several operas for the Comedie-Italienne, beginning in 1777.

Saint-Georges lived alone in a small apartment in Paris during the final two years of his life. He died of gangrene in a leg wound on June 12, 1799.

Written by Dianne Washington