Ira Frederick Aldridge was the first African American actor to achieve success on the international stage. He also pushed social boundaries by playing opposite white actresses in England and becoming known as the preeminent Shakespearean actor and tragedian of the 19th Century.
Ira Frederick Aldridge was born in New York City, New York on July 24, 1807 to free blacks Reverend Daniel and Lurona Aldridge. Although his parents encouraged him to become a pastor, he studied classical education at the African Free School in New York where he was first exposed to the performance arts. While there he became impressed with acting and by age 15 was associating with professional black actors in the city. They encouraged Aldridge to join the prestigious African Grove Theatre, an all-black theatre troupe founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett in 1821. He apprenticed under Hewlett, the first African American Shakespearean actor. Though Aldridge was gainfully employed as an actor in the 1820s, he felt that the United States was not a hospitable place for theatrical performers. Many whites resented the claim to cultural equality that they saw in black performances of Shakespeare and other white-authored texts. Realizing this, Aldridge emigrated to Europe in 1824 as the valet for British-American actor James William Wallack.
Aldridge eventually moved to Glasgow, Scotland and began studies at the University of Glasgow, where he enhanced his voice and dramatic skills in theatre. He moved to England and made his debut in London in 1825 as Othello at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, a role he would remain associated with until his death. The critic reviews gave Aldridge the name Roscius (the celebrated Roman actor of tragedy and comedy). Aldridge embraced it and began using the stage name “The African Roscius.” He even created the myth that he was the descendant of a Senegalese Prince whose family was forced to escape to the United States to save their lives. This deception erased Aldridge’s American upbringing and cast him as an exotic and almost magical being.
Throughout the mid-1820s to 1860 Ira Aldridge slowly forged a remarkable career. He performed in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Bath, and Bristol in King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice. He also freely adapted classical plays, changing characters, eliminating scenes and installing new ones, even from other plays. In 1852 he embarked on a series of continental tours that intermittently would last until the end of his life. He performed his full repertoire in Prussia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, and Poland. Some of the honors he received include the Prussian Gold Medal for Arts and Sciences from King Frederick, the Golden Cross of Leopold from the Czar of Russia, and the Maltese Cross from Berne, Switzerland.
Aldridge died on August 7, 1867 while on tour in Lodz, Poland. He was 60 at the time of his death. Aldridge had been married twice and left behind several children including a daughter named Luranah who would, in her own right, go on to become a well-known actress and opera singer. There is a memorial plaque at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stafford-upon-Avon, in honor of his contributions to the performing arts. In 2014 a second plaque was unveiled in Lodz, Poland to honor his memory and legacy.
Paul Robeson followed Aldridge by assuming the role of Othello at the Savoy Theatre on March 19, 1930.
Bruce’s Beach
A small beach resort community in the city of Manhattan Beach, California, Bruce’s Beach was once owned by and operated for African Americans with no opportunities to vacation at white resorts due to segregation. Bruce’s Beach was one of the few beaches in Southern California in the 1920s that was open to African Americans.
When incorporated in 1912, George H. Peck (1856-1940), one of the founders of Manhattan Beach, rejected the practice of racial exclusion. A clause written into the city’s deed stipulated that two city blocks of beach-front property would be set aside for African Americans to purchase. This allowed Charles Willa Bruce, entrepreneurs and new settlers in the community, to purchase the property for $1,225 in 1912. Later adding three additional lots, they built Southern California’s first black beach resort. The admiration for Southern California’s good life and the vision of the new owners encouraged the building of new homes and cottages that would cater exclusively to African American vacationers, many of whom craved the ocean breezes, bathhouses, outdoor sports, dining, and dancing.
As more coastal land became affordable and available for purchase, and the African American population in Los Angeles increased, this brought more black vacationers to Bruce’s Beach, which also meant more white opposition in the white community and resentment towards the black beachfront resort. By the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had garnered a local following who declared that the African Americans who frequented Bruce’s Beach were no longer welcome. Charles and Willa Bruce had developed the beach resort into a flourishing enterprise accessible to all — until the designation of ‘Black Beach’ was branded on it by the Ku Klux Klan and the City Council of Manhattan Beach in 1920. It was roped off by the city, and The Bruces and their visitors were consistently harassed on the basis of their race. The white residents protested as soon as the resort opened. It should be noted the Bruces never designated their enterprise as exclusively a ‘Black Beach.’ The city condemned Bruce’s Beach, and some residents pressured black property owners to sell their land at prices below fair market value. Other properties were seized through eminent domain proceedings commenced in 1924. These actions forced both the black landholders and most black beachgoers to relocate to the newly established blacks-only section of Santa Monica Beach known as “The Inkwell.”
Manhattan Beach tried to lease the Bruce’s Beach land to a private individual as a whites-only beach but relented in the face of a civil disobedience campaign organized by the NAACP in 1927. Over time the beach area was called City Park or Beach Front Park. In 2006, the ownership changed again. In response the Manhattan Beach City Council renamed the area Bruce’s Beach, and it was officially designated as such during a public ceremony on March 31, 2007.
The park sits on a slope overlooking the ocean. It includes rolling grassy terraces with benches and small trees, and is located a few blocks from the beach between 26th and 27th street, and runs west from Highland Avenue to Manhattan Avenue.
McGhee, Frederick Lamar (1861–09 September 1912), lawyer and black activist, was born in Aberdeen, Mississippi, the son of Abraham McGhee and Sarah Walker, slaves. Although his father, a blacksmith, was not afforded a formal education, he learned to read and write, later becoming a Baptist preacher. Abraham McGhee also made certain that his children were literate, teaching each of them how to read and write. Such skills served young Frederick well when his parents died in 1873. Having moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee, soon after his parents were freed, McGhee remained there, studying at Knoxville College under the tutelage of Presbyterian missionaries. Without completing his undergraduate studies, he soon ventured to Chicago, working as a waiter for a time and then studying law with Edward H. Morris, a prominent local lawyer.
Fredrick L. McGhee (October 28, 1861 – September 9, 1912) was a black civil rights activist and one of America’s first African American lawyers. McGhee, born as a slave but who later was able to achieve a substantial career as an attorney and become one of the civil rights pioneers, was a contemporary of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.
McGhee was born in Aberdeen, Mississippi, to Abraham McGhee and Sarah Walker, who were slaves. His father, from Blount County, Tennessee, was a literate black slave who learned how to read and write without being formally educated, and later became a Baptist preacher. Abraham McGhee taught his three children, Mathew, Barclay and Fredrick, how to read and write. Abraham McGhee died in 1873 and soon Fredrick’s mother died leaving her three sons orphans.
McGhee was able to attend Knoxville College in Tennessee, and graduated with a degree in law in 1885. Although he began his legal career in Chicago, McGhee settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he became the first black lawyer admitted to the bar in that state. With a much smaller black population from which to attract clients, McGhee primarily represented whites, gaining a reputation for competence and oratory. He also became the first African American lawyer admitted to the bar in Tennessee and Illinois. He was one of the most highly skilled criminal lawyers of the Old Northwest.
In his law practice, McGhee once won a clemency from President Benjamin Harrison for a client who was a black soldier falsely accused of a crime.
In 1886, he married Mattie B. Crane. The couple had one daughter.
Despite his success as a criminal lawyer, he was primarily a race relations advocate. By the early 1900s, McGhee became interested in the national discussion concerning racial discrimination and social equality. In 1905, McGhee with Du Bois and others formed one of the first national civil rights organizations, the Niagara Movement, which was an attempt by more radical blacks to directly and honestly oppose the conservative actions and views of Booker T. Washington. The Niagara Movement was the forerunner of the NAACP. In September 1905, Du Bois went so far as to give McGhee full credit for creating the more radical entity, stating, “The honor of founding the organization belongs to F. L. McGhee, who first suggested it.”
McGhee was very active politically. He was chosen to be a presidential elector by the Minnesota Republican party in the spring of 1892, but after protests by white Republicans, he was replaced before the start of the 1892 Republican National Convention, which was held in Minneapolis in June. McGhee remained a party member until the spring of 1893, when party bosses reneged on another political promise. Frustrated, McGhee changed his allegiance to the Democratic Party, becoming one of the first nationally prominent black Democrats at a time when nearly all blacks were Republicans.
McGhee converted from the Baptist denomination to Catholicism at a time when the vast majority of African Americans were Baptists. He was very active in Saint Peter Claver Church, a Roman Catholic church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
McGhee died in 1912, at age 50, of pleurisy, three years after the founding of the NAACP.
Sarah Breedlove–who later would come to be known as Madam C. J. Walker–was born on December 23, 1867 on the same Delta, Louisiana plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, had been enslaved before the end of the Civil War. This child of sharecroppers transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into one of the twentieth century’s most successful, self-made women entrepreneurs.
Orphaned at age seven, she often said, “I got my start by giving myself a start.” She and her older sister, Louvenia, survived by working in the cotton fields of Delta and nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi. At 14, she married Moses McWilliams to escape abuse from her cruel brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. Her only daughter, Lelia (later known as A’Lelia Walker) was born on June 6, 1885. When her husband died two years later, she moved to St. Louis to join her four brothers who had established themselves as barbers. Working for as little as $1.50 a day, she managed to save enough money to educate her daughter in the city’s public schools. Friendships with other black women who were members of St. Paul A.M.E. Church and the National Association of Colored Women exposed her to a new way of viewing the world.
During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose most of her hair. She consulted her brothers for advice and also experimented with many homemade remedies and store-bought products, including those made by Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur. In 1905 Sarah moved to Denver as a sales agent for Malone, then married her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, a St. Louis newspaperman. After changing her name to “Madam” C. J. Walker, she founded her own business and began selling Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, a scalp conditioning and healing formula, which she claimed had been revealed to her in a dream. Madam Walker, by the way, did NOT invent the straightening comb or chemical perms, though many people incorrectly believe that to be true.
To promote her products, the new “Madam C.J. Walker” traveled for a year and a half on a dizzying crusade throughout the heavily black South and Southeast, selling her products door to door, demonstrating her scalp treatments in churches and lodges, and devising sales and marketing strategies. In 1908, she temporarily moved her base to Pittsburgh where she opened Lelia College to train Walker “hair culturists.”
By early 1910, she had settled in Indianapolis, then the nation’s largest inland manufacturing center, where she built a factory, hair and manicure salon and another training school. Less than a year after her arrival, Walker grabbed national headlines in the black press when she contributed $1,000 to the building fund of the “colored” YMCA in Indianapolis.
In 1913, while Walker traveled to Central America and the Caribbean to expand her business, her daughter A’Lelia, moved into a fabulous new Harlem townhouse and Walker Salon, designed by black architect, Vertner Tandy. “There is nothing to equal it,” she wrote to her attorney, F.B. Ransom. “Not even on Fifth Avenue.”
Walker herself moved to New York in 1916, leaving the day-to-day operations of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis to Ransom and Alice Kelly, her factory forelady and a former school teacher. She continued to oversee the business and to work in the New York office. Once in Harlem, she quickly became involved in Harlem’s social and political life, taking special interest in the NAACP’s anti-lynching movement to which she contributed $5,000.
In July 1917, when a white mob murdered more than three dozen blacks in East St. Louis, Illinois, Walker joined a group of Harlem leaders who visited the White House to present a petition advocating federal anti-lynching legislation.
As her business continued to grow, Walker organized her agents into local and state clubs. Her Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America convention in Philadelphia in 1917 must have been one of the first national meetings of businesswomen in the country. Walker used the gathering not only to reward her agents for their business success, but to encourage their political activism as well. “This is the greatest country under the sun,” she told them. “But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice. We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible.”
Madam Walker died on May 25, 1919 at 51 years old of kidney failure and other complications due to hypertension at Villa Lewaro, her Irvington-on-Hudson , New York estate. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Madam Walker is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first self-made American woman millionaire, who neither inherited her money or married someone who was a millionaire. At the time of her death, Madam Walker’s estate had an estimated value of $600,000 to $700,000 (equivalent to approximately $8.9 million to $10.4 million in 2020 dollars according to the CPI Inflation Calculator). The total sales of her company, the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, during the final year of her life reached more than $500,000, making the value of her company several times that amount. The combination of her personal assets (real estate, furnishings, jewelry, etc.) and the value of her business was well over $1,000,000 (equivalent to $14.9 million in 2020)
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.”
– Madam C.J. Walker
ELIZABETH “LIBBA” COTTEN
Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was born in 1893 near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her mother was a cook, and her father was “a sometime moonshiner who also set dynamite in iron mines.” Libba Cotten began borrowing her brother’s banjo (against his wishes) from a very young age — “My head was always full of music,” she said — and around age nine she saved her wages and bought her own Sears, Roebuck guitar. (She was already working as a domestic, making 75 cents a month.)
Because she was left-handed, Cotten taught herself to play by turning her brother’s banjo upside down so her right hand was on the fretboard and her left picked the strings. Most notably, this also meant she played the treble notes with her thumb and the lower bass notes with her fingers. Her smooth, masterful two-finger picking, which sounds warm and full, became her signature style, known as “Cotten-picking,” and it’s worth watching vintage video of a cardiganed Cotten playing “Freight Train” or “In the Sweet By and By,” her eyes gently closed as she plucks the notes.
Though many had never heard Cotten’s name, they’d heard her most popular song, “Freight Train,” which became a hit when the crunchy folk ensemble Peter, Paul and Mary recorded and released it in 1963. (Many others have since recorded their own versions of the tune.) It was a song she’d written at 11 years old. But though it became a standard, Cotten was never famous, and she’d slipped into total obscurity for four decades while raising a family of her own and working as a domestic in North Carolina, then New York City and Washington, D.C.
While working briefly at a department store in the late 1940s, Cotten helped a lost little girl find her mother, and was offered a job as a maid for the family. The little girl was Peggy Seeger, who would go on to find folk-singing fame, and her mother was Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer and folk music specialist. Cotten began doing the “washing, cleaning and baking” for the family of folk lovers — Charles Seeger, the patriarch, was a well-known musicologist; brother Mike was a musician and folklorist; and Pete Seeger was Peggy’s half brother — and it wasn’t long before she picked up a guitar and blew their minds.
In 1985, at 93, Cotten won a Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for her album Elizabeth Cotten — Live! “I was so excited when they gave me this,” she told the Elmira, New York Star-Gazette. “I was sitting in my seat just watching and listening and when the man said my name I got so weak and scared I didn’t think I could go up there myself.” But Cotten did ascend the stage to accept the award. “All I could think of to say was ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. If I had my banjo with me I’d play you a tune.’