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.
Not only were parts of Shirley Graham's opera Tom-Tom performed last month, Boston's Castle of our Skins, producer of concerts and other cultural programming that celebrates Black excellence in classical music, just filled its inaugural Shirley Graham creative-in-residence position, which was awarded to
Shirley Graham's opera Tom-Tom, the first opera written and produced by an African American woman, will be the subject of a Caramoor Summer Music Festival exploration this summer, with a live performance, as well as live-streaming of the event.
See In Black America's Black History Month tribute to the great Lena Horne, who also shared a page of the People's Voice with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois for a time.
Listen to this Studio 360 interview with actress Uta Hagen--great material on her commitment to civil rights. She was one of the youngest to be blacklisted in 1950.