Kicha's photos

1. Bessie Vaughn 2. Ida Day 3. 'Tiny' Jones 4. Charles Moore 5. Kate Jones 6. ? 7. Jessie Ellis 8. Maggie Davis 9. Hattie Hopkins 10.Bert Williams 11.? Harris 12.George Walker 13.Hattie McIntosh 14.? 15.Renie Norris 16.? 17.Daisy Tapley 18.Lottie Williams (Bert Williams' wife) 19.? Tuck 20.Aida Overton Walker (George Walker's wife) 21.Ella Anderson 22.Lizzie Avery 23.Lavina Rogers 24.Jim Vaughn 25.William C. Elkins 26.Walter Richardson 27.Richard Conners 28.? Barker 29.Will Accoe 30.George Catlin 31.Chip Ruff? 32.Jimmie ? 33.John Lubrie Hill 34.Henri Green Tapley (Daisy Tapley's husband) 35.Henry Troy 36.Marshall Craig 37.Theodore Pankey 38.Harry Stafford 39.Charles L. Saulsbury? 40.Alex C. Rogers In Dahomey was the first full-length musical written and played by an entirely Black cast to be performed on Broadway. The play was based on a libretto by Jesse A. Shipp, with music by Will Marion Cook and lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alex Rogers. Cook’s music would become to be considered by many as the ‘turning point for African American representation’. Source: Robert Kimball Archives More information can be found here: www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/in-dahomey.html

Dancer Ida Forsyne as "Topsy," with Abbie Mitchell's Tennessee Students in London, England. Ida Forsyne, jazz dancer who was named by poet Langston Hughes as one of the twelve best dancers of all time, was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother became a domestic servant when she was two years old, after the disappearance of her father. At the age of ten, she was dancing and singing for small sums of money at the local candy store and house-rent parties, and she cakewalked for twenty-five cents a day at the Chicago World's Fair, traveling through the festival site in a wagon with a ragtime band to drum up trade. Many shows originated in Chicago at the time, and so Forsynes haunted the Alhambra Theater, watching rehearsals of such shows as Coontown 400 and The South before the War. At age fourteen Forsyne ran away with a tab show, The Black Bostonians, in which everyone did their own specialties. She sang "My Hannah Lady" and also performed a Buck Dance in her inimitable eccentric style that includes rhythmic stepping and legomania. The finale of the show was a plantation scene that included the entire cast. When the show broke up in Bute, Montana, Forsyne adopted a five-year-old boy as a "prop" and sang her way back home to Chicago by walking down the aisles of the railroad coaches, hand-in-hand with him, harmonizing "On the Banks of the Wabash" as she passed the child's hat and collected enough money to pay fare and little more. In 1898 the fifteen-year-old joined Sisseretta Jones' Black Patti Troubadours. "A girl in the show was sick, so I went down and did my number, ‘My Hannah Lady,' and got the job at $15 a week," Forsyne told Marshall Stearns. "I was the only young girl in the company of twenty-six. For my specialty, I pushed a baby carriage across the stage and sang a lullaby, ‘You're Just a Little Nigger but You're Mine All Mine,' and no one thought of objecting in those day." The show had a cakewalking contest at every performance and Forsyne and partner won it seven nights straight in a row by adding legomania and tumbling in the breaks. Forsyne had the ability to perform any step she saw. In 1899, on her sixteenth birthday, Forsyne and the Black Patti troupe arrived in San Francisco, and remembers that they stayed at a fine white hotel and ate together at a long table, and that "everyone was so nice to us." Returning to New York, she easily got jobs working in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Coney Island, working in minstrel-styled shows such as Henderson's Big Theater (at Coney Island) with famous acts like Eddie Cantor. It was at Coney Island that Forsyne lost her voice in an "all song-and-dance" format in which performers would sing a verse of the song, then a chorus, and then dance a chorus. "I was like a coon shouter until my voice gave out," she said about her voice which was in a strong alto-range. She thereafter learned how to put a song across by "sort of talking it." In 1902, Forsyne joined the original Smart Set, an all- colored show by the white producer Gus Hill and featuring Ernest Hogan, Billy McClain, and the Hun Brothers, and in which she talked the song, "Moana" and performed a solo jazz dance. She then joined Will Marion Cook's The Southerners on the New York Roof Garden, with a mixed cast of thirty-five performers. In 1905 she went abroad with The Tennessee Students, a troupe of seventeen performers (including Abbie Mitchell, comedy dancer Ernest Hogan, and sand dancer Henry Williams), many of whom played stringed instruments and sang in a transitional style between ragtime and jazz. When the show opened at the Palace Theater in London in 1906, Forsyne (her picture on the front cover of the program) was the billing star, singing "Topsy, the Famous Negro Dancer." With her radiating personality and facial expression, she was immediately noticed. Wrote the Daily Telegraph: "If Topsy is not soon the talk of the town we are very much mistaken." For the succeeding nine years. Forsyne toured Europe under the management of the Marinelli Agency, the largest in Europe, in what would be the peak of her career. The entire first year she played the Moulin Rouge in Paris, singing and dancing her fast mixture of eccentric steps. She was then booked throughout England where for the first time she saw Bill Robinson and Ralph Cooper. At the Alhambra Theatre in London, she introduced her Sack dance to special music with a ballet company. A stagehand carried her onstage in a big potato sack; she threw one leg out, then an arm, and so on until, dumped in the middle of the stage, she danced before a backup chorus line of ballet dancers who were paid extra to appear in blackface. While the performance was considered "arty," Forsyne was improvising jazz steps. She quickly rose to such fame that she gave a command performance for the Royal family. In 1911, in the middle of her Moscow dance program, tiny Forsyne (she wore a size two shoe) suddenly inserted a series of improvised kazotsky kicks into her routine and brought the house down; she was immediately hailed as the "greatest Russian dancer of then all." She thereafter closed her act with kazotsky kicks-- which began from a squat, arms folded at the chest, and legs kicking out, first one leg and then another. Though Russian dancers usually stood up between steps, Forsyne could not wait. She changed steps and traveled across the stage in a crouch, working out new combinations. She flung both legs out in front of her and touched her toes with her hands before coming down in time with the music. She also mixed down-steps with up-steps, and cross-ankle steps, and as a finale, would kazotsky all the way across the stage, and return backwards. European theaters booked Forsyne for nine years without a break. Forsyne popularized Russian dancing in the United States, after pioneering that style abroad. But she was, above and beyond, a jazz dancer. She remembered many early jazz tap steps, among them "Going to the World's Fair," which was strut in which one put both feet together and moved forward on the toes. Another step was "Scratchin' the Gravel," or the "Sooey," a short sliding motion alternately on each foot; Forsyne described it as a two-step with a dip. In 1914, Forsyne returned to New York from touring abroad and performed at the Lincoln and Lafayette theaters. High class society people went to the Lafayette and the management didn't present of-color blues singers, comedians and Shake dancers from T.O.B.A., as did at the Lincoln." In 1916, Forsyne saw Darktown Follies and remembers that it was the talk of the town. "Eddie Retor was featured in his smooth military routine, and Toots Davis was doing his Over the Top and Through the Trenches, and they were new steps then," she told Marshall Stearns. For two years (from 1920 to 1922), Forsyne worked as a personal maid, onstage and off, to Sophie Tucker, earning $50 a week. Onstage, Tucker sang thirteen songs, accompanied by pianist Al Seeger, and wanted a dancer to help whip up applause at the end of the show—and Forsyne filled that position. The act broke up in Washington, D.C. where, on the Keith circuit, new rules disallowed black performers to appear onstage with a white performer unless they wore blackface. Furthermore, no performer of color working backstage was permitted to watch the show. Tucker refused to have Forsyne don blackface, and while Forsyne was banned from the show, she was permitted to watch the show from the wings. By 1924, Forsyne was back on the T.O.B.A. black vaudeville circuit as one of six dancing girls with blues singer Mamie Smith's act. After touring the South with the late version of The Smart Set, Forsyne returned to New York where Harlem nightclubs were thriving. Refused after auditioning at the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn, and the Nest, because of the preference for light-skinned and scantily-clad chorus girls, Forsyne was promised a job at Small's Paradise, which never panned out. As did a job working at the New World Club in Atlantic City in 1927, which was recommended to her by Jack "Legs" Diamond. Forsyne was apparently rejected for not approving of the abbreviated costumes which were de rigeur for female jazz dancers. Back on T.O.B.A., Forsyne earned $35 a week working with Bessie Smith, a show that allowed her to reprise her Russian specialty. She left Smith's company in 1928, vowing she would never tour the South again. After working three-and-a-half years as a domestic, and then as an elevator girl, Forsyne quit dancing. In 1963, however, she played the part of Mrs. Noah in Green Pastures. That same year, she appeared with Rex Ingraham in The Emperor Jones. As late as 1951, Forsyne assisted Ruthanna Boris for the choreography for the New York City Ballet's "The Cakewalk," choreographed by George Balanchine. In 1962, at the age of seventy-nine, Forsyne could still perform a cartwheel. She devoted most of her spare time to visiting various hospitals where she entertained and cheered up sick friends. By 1966 she herself retired to the Concord Baptist Nursing Home in Brooklyn, where she died in 1983, at the age of 100. Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol I. (2004); Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows (Vol 1, 2nd ed.) by Henry T Sampson

This was taken when Josephine performed in Finland along with her 16 piece orchestra. Born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine Baker spent her youth in poverty before learning to dance and finding success on Broadway. In the 1920s she moved to France and soon became one of Europe's most popular and highest-paid performers. She worked for the French Resistance during World War II, and during the 1950s and '60s devoted herself to fighting segregation and racism in the United States. After beginning her comeback to the stage in 1973, Josephine Baker died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1975, and was buried with military honors. [bio.com]

Lottie Grady (1887-1970), as she appeared on sheet music for The Merry Widower, 1907. She appeared as one of the lead characters in what's credited as being the first all black cast in a film company started by a black man, William Foster (stage name Juli Jones). The Railroad Porter came out in 1912. Lottie Grady was born on September 8, 1887 in Chicago, Illinois. She was a well known stage actress in the early 20th century. Originally from the south side of Chicago, she was a talented singer, dancer, and actress. She performed on stage with the likes of Bert Williams (1904's show "Lode of Kole"), Jesse Shipp and S. H. Dudley ("The Smart Set") before returning to her hometown and becoming the leading lady of the Pekin Theatre Stock Company, a collection of actors and actresses who produced and performed in plays and other dramatic presentations, many written by African Americans, or adapted to appeal to a predominately African American audience. She would then join with William Foster and, with other members of the Pekin Theatre stock company, like Charles Gilpin, Abbie Mitchell and others, would act in his "photoplays." It was reported in contemporary newspapers that Grady would appear at showings of the films and while the reels were changed, would entertain the audience by singing. She retired from performing in 1919, when she married Charles Roxborough (1887-1963), he served one term in the State Senate of Michigan (1931-1933) thus becoming the first black man elected to that chamber. The couple had two sons, Charles Anthony and John Walter. The couple divorced in 1939. After her divorce Lottie moved to the resort town of Idlewild, Michigan, where for almost thirty years she owned and operated (along with the help of her oldest son), a popular restaurant called The Rosana Tavern. She passed away on February 20, 1970 in Idlewild, Michigan. [imdb.com, by Jane Margaret Laight]

William Tillman faced a brutal choice: slavery or death. He was a 27-year old African-American sailor born a free man in Delaware. He was steward and cook on board the merchant schooner S.J. Waring, about 300 tons, bound for Montevideo, Uruguay with an assorted cargo. Tillman had been on the crew of the Yankee merchantman the S. J. Waring. On July 6 the 300-ton schooner, manned by a crew of eight under the command of Captain Francis Smith, had left New York bound for Montevideo, Uruguay. Three days into its voyage, the ship was captured by a Confederate privateer, named the Jefferson Davis. The Civil War was less than four months old. The rebels ransacked the vessel and ordered Captain Smith, to haul down the Stars and Stripes. He was then taken to the privateer. Tillman was told that he, like the ship, was southern property and that he would be sold into bondage when the ship reached its new destination. The confederates put a five man prize crew on Tillman’s ship and turned her south, toward Charleston. Now, each day at sea beat down on Tillman like a hammer. An overwhelming sense of dread, however, was gradually replaced by iron-willed resolve. Tillman, in concert, with a handful of passengers hatched a bold plan. Tillman’s duties gave him the run of most of the vessel. The rebels were used to seeing him moving about. Moreover, while cautious around the handful of white crewmen and passengers, the prize crew did not consider Tillman capable of either bravery or treachery; it was to be their undoing. Tillman was key to the recapture of the S.J. Waring. And he struck in the middle of the night. On the night of July 16, with the captured ship just 50 miles off Charleston and the captors asleep in their bunks, they sprung, “killing the three with a hatchet, and throwing the bodies overboard. It was all finished in five minutes,” Harper’s Weekly reported in an August 3, 1861 article. In a few bloody minutes, William Tillman had forestalled his descent into slavery and retaken the Waring from the privateers. He now set about returning to New York, offering to unchain the two remaining members of the prize crew if they would help sail the ship and warning them, “If you cut up any antics overboard you go; recollect that I am captain of this ship now.” Hugging the coast, the Waring sailed north “with a fair wind." Bryce Mackinnon one of the passengers that day reported, “On Sunday morning July 21, 1861, at 9 o’clock we got a pilot off Sandy Hook and soon after hired a tug for $60 to tow us up to New York where we arrived at 4 o’clock truly thankful for our great deliverance. Tillman, the negro steward, became the lion of the day, and his history, character and personal appearance were minutely investigated.” Tillman’s heroic action struck a responsive chord among a Northern population that was reeling from the news of the Union defeat at Bull Run on the same day the Waring arrived in New York. The New-York Tribune wrote, “To this colored man was the nation indebted for the first vindication of its honor on the sea.” Another publication reported that the achievement drew “unstinted praise from all parties, even those who are usually awkward in any other vernacular than derision of the colored man.” At Barnum’s Museum Tillman was the center of an “attractive gaze to daily increasing thousands” and “pictorials vied with each other in portraying his features, and in graphic delineations of the scene on board the brig.” Several months later the federal government awarded Tillman the sum of $6,000 (a hefty sum in those days) as prize-money for the capture of the schooner. Sources: ‘The Lion of the Day’ by Rick Beard, NY Times (Aug. 2011) and 'A Story of High Seas Heroism' by C.R. Gibbs, Maritime Administration Photo: Tintype of Mr. Tillman photographed by Abbott of NY was part of the Howard Wolverton Collection of Black American History which was up for auction at the Quinn's Auction House on February 11, 2016 in Falls Church, Virginia.

The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race (Vol. 1), 1919. In recent years the Negro woman has begun to find herself. Time was when both by herself and in the minds of the general public it was decided, yea determined, that her place was in the home, in the school room and in the Sunday School. Gradually she got into founding institutions, schools, social settlements and the like. She went on the lecture platform. She traveled in America and in Europe as a singer. In all these places she found herself a complete success. Then a few ventured into unheard of fields ... into politics and in business. Again success is crowning their endeavors. Why should they not enter any and all branches of work? One of the leading Negro women in business, and general social work is Mrs. Lula Barnes of Savannah, Georgia. Though an Alabamian by birth and education Mrs. Barnes is a Georgian by adoption and achievement. She was born in Huntsville, Alabama, August 22, 1868, she had many difficulties in getting an early education. However, Huntsville Normal and Industrial Institute was near at hand; and so after several years she entered here and gained her life training. Soon after her school days she was married and set about to make a happy home and to aid her husband in every possible way. Providence deemed it otherwise. Spurred by adversity, she now began to cast about a livelihood. Living in Savannah, she thought she saw an opening for a Negro grocery. She thought also that a Negro woman should just as well conduct this business as could a man. Hence she launched forth into the business. She opened a store on Price Street, and by courtesy, fair dealing and shrewd business tact made her store one to be reckoned with in the business world. For ten years she was a grocer, and gave up, or sold out, only to enter other fields. She closed her grocery books in 1893. During her ten years in business Mrs. Barnes had practiced economy. She now made several paying investments. She bought a handsome residence, which is her home, on East Henry Street. She bought twelve rent houses, which in themselves provide her with a pretty comfortable income. She also owns five vacant lots in Savannah. Having made these investments, which were safe and which would protect her in case of inability, she felt safe in placing money in several worthy enterprises. She owns stock and is a director in the Wage Earner's Bank of Savannah, in the Standard Life Insurance Company, in the Afro-American Company and in the Union Development Company. Mrs. Barnes was married to Mr. Richard Barnes of Savannah on August 16, 1884. He died in 1911.

Fannie Clay was born in Ripley, Tennessee in 1891, the daughter of former slaves Elen Gilliland Clay and Hugh Clay. In 1910 she graduated from Lauderdale County Training School and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee with her family. She eventually relocated to Chicago, where she studied to become a pharmacist. While working at a drug store to pay for her education she met the man who would become her husband of twenty-one years. Fannie Clay and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson were married January 27, 1922, (she was his 2nd wife). No longer focusing on her career she worked as her husband's secretary and business manager. She's credited as playing a significant role in his success by working behind the scenes. They divorced June 25, 1943 due to his gambling, womanizing, and Fannie’s desire to have him slow down due to his heart condition. When they divorced Fannie is quoted as having said they “agreed to disagree" but remained the best of friends. The couple never had children. In the 2001 movie “Bojangles” Gregory Hines played the lead and Fannie's character was portrayed by Kimberly Elise. Photo: National Vaudeville Artists Fund (1929) Source: blackripley.com

Portrait of a young African American woman identified as Helen Jones. Photographed circa 1915 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of a handsome African American man identified as William Powell, M.S.S. (1882-1960). At one time he was an instructor with the Mounted Service School, where cavalrymen werfe trained. He served in the U.S. Army until WWI; he retired as a Sergeant, and eventually ended up in the Old Soldiers' Home in Fort Leavenworth. The above photograph was taken circa 1913 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of an African American family identified as the Bohmer Family. Photographed circa 1912 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Beautiful portrait of an African American couple and their child identified as the C.E. Wilson family. Photographed circa 1912 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of two African American women identified as sisters, Florence Ann Bell and Grace E. Bell. Photographed circa 1908 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas The two women are sisters Florence Ann Bell and Grace E. Bell. Florence married Lloyd William Henson Hardin in 1893 at the age of nineteen. They had a total of five kids. Her husband -was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. He passed in 1950; Florence passed in 1976 at the ripe old age of 102. Florence's sister Grace, taught music in the Kansas City school system until she married John Muse and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota and later to Chicago. After her husband passed, she returned to Kansas City where she sang in the Allen AME Church Choir and taught music until she died six months shy of her 100th birthday in 1978.

Portrait of a young African American woman identified as Mrs. Will Richardson. Photographed circa 1907 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of a young African American woman identified as Ora Asbury. Photographed circa 1907 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of an African American family identified as the Laffertys. Photographed circa 1907 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of a handsome African American man identified as Mr. Sanford. Photographed circa 1906 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Circa 1904 photograph of a beautiful little girl. Frances Ruth Williams was the daughter of Sarah William and John Palmer. Born in Junction City, Kansas on September 8, 1898. She lived with her grandmother, Mrs. Clara Williams. She graduated from Junction City High School in 1917 and worked in the Fort Riley area as a stenographer. She and her grandmother moved West to Oakland, California. In 1921 she married a building contractor named Clarence A. Wilkes, the couple had a daughter named Rita Jane. Frances Ruth passed away in San Francisco on February 2, 1984. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas