The March on Washington Film Festival is screening a documentary about Hazel Scott's art and activism. The film was produced by the Apollo Theater, narrated by Hazel Scott biographer Karen Chilton, and features performances by pianist Damien Sneed and saxophonist & vocalist Camille Thurman. Full information here.
A nice tribute to Judy Holliday, by film and video archivist and appraiser Audrey Kupferberg! Holliday was born 100 years ago today, and died tragically young of cancer, at the age of 44.
A Terrible Silence focuses on five of the 41 women who were blacklisted in television in 1950. The play tells something of their lives, their dreams, their prolific talents and their silencers.
Dorothy Parker was a lifelong defender of civil rights and civil liberties. When she died, she left her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as this article describes. After his assassination, her cremated remains variously resided in a crematory in Westchester County, a Manhattan lawyer's office, , a garden outside NAACP headquarters.
Fredi Washington, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and many others all had roles in the 1921 Broadway hit, Shuffle Along, the first Broadway hit written, composed and performed by African Americans. Author and teacher Caseen Gaines has a new book about this and other influential Black productions: Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way.
From the Ghost Busters remake to The Green Knight to (long ago now) the remake of Battlestar Galactica, some people get pretty worked up about casting choices.
Terrific article on Hazel Scott by biographer Karen Chilton. In 1950, Scott brought a successful lawsuit against a restaurant near Spokane, Washington, where she and a traveling companion had been denied service, the waitress told them, “because they were Negroes.”[fn]“Hazel Scott Attorneys Score in Initial Round,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, April 17, 1950.
Benjamin Talton reminds us about problematic US record on fighting global white supremacy. Cites "African American activists’ steadfast opposition to authoritarianism and white supremacy at home and abroad offer lessons for the U.S. government," especially Cold War dissenters like Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Ashawnta Jackson writes for JSTOR Daily about how "Black-owned beauty-centered businesses" used images of stars like Lena Horne to change mainstream understandings of beauty.
