Judy Holliday was brilliant. She was a smart and funny, a member of a Village improv group called the Revuers. She was committed to a wide range of political causes, including serving on the radical Voice of Freedom Committee along with Dorothy Parker and Paul Robeson, and supporting the Civil Rights Congress.
Hannah Weinstein was a blacklisted writer who left the US in 1950 with her three young daughters and founded Sapphire Films in England, a company that went on to inaugurate the costume drama craze of the fifties before returning to the US in the 1960s and, with Ossie Davis, James Earl Jones, and Rita Moreno, founding Third World Cinema Corporation. Her daughter Paula became a successful movie producer and studio executive in the US.
I just stumbled across this article, which combines three wonderful items: Langston Hughes, the Chicago Defender, and ghosts. Hughes was a poet and writer who was blacklisted in the 1950s and the subject of much government and anti-communist organization concern because of his powerful voice and the respect he commanded. The Chicago Defender was one of the most important African American newspapers.
Author Lillian Hellman's plays have been pulled from the shelves of Orange County Public School libraries in Orlando, Florida, victims of House Bill 1069--a bill restricting everything from pronoun use to sex education and other issues deemed offensive by Florida conservatives.
So nice to see The Root's great slideshow of Black stars from the first half of the twentieth century, especially the brilliant Canada Lee and Harry Belafonte, both of whom deserve far more attention.
Great photo of Gypsy Rose Lee at the 1939 World's Fair in this photo spread on burlesque. Lee was a burlesque artist and so much more--a brilliant autodidact, she also wrote mysteries that capture a sense of the worlds we worked in. Check out her The G-String Murders.
The New Yorker just reviewed Paramount+'s new streaming series, Fellow Travelers. I'm so glad to see more media about the blacklist era, especially stories that explore the sordidness of anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn (who were front men for a dense network of gossips and homophobes).
You can read an excerpt from Donald Bogle's new book on Lena Horne in The Hollywood Reporter. And if you haven't already, read his groundbreaking Brown Sugar: Over One Hundred Years of America's Black Female Superstars as well.
Choreographer, dancer, teacher, and activist Helen Tamiris recently received a posthumous award from Dance Magazine, honoring "the artistry, integrity, and resilience that dance artists" have exhibited. Born Helen Becker, she took the name Tamiris for the Massagetaen queen Tomyris, who defeated and killed Cyrus the Great and his invading army in 530 BCE.