TALBERT, MARY MORRIS BURNETT
(September 17, 1866–October 15, 1923) Activist
Mary Morris Burnett Talbert’s abilities as an organizer and commitment as an activist impacted many of the important issues of her day. She had such key roles as vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), chairman of the Dyer Antilynching Bill Committee, and delegate to the International Council of Woman.
Born in Oberlin, Ohio, on September 17, 1866, Talbert graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and went on to Oberlin College. Although literature was her focus in college, the institution encouraged her ideals regarding community service. Her classmates, who also benefited from their experience at Oberlin and became activists in their community, were well-known women, including Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Hallie Q. Brown.
Talbert graduated from Oberlin in 1886, and accepted a teaching position at Bethel University in Little Rock, Arkansas, a segregated school during that time. She was later appointed assistant principal at Bethel, making her the first woman to be named in this role in the state. The following year, she was named principal of Union High School in Little Rock. In 1891, Talbert married William Herbert Talbert and moved to Buffalo, New York. The couple had their first and only child in 1892. While in Buffalo, Talbert turned her interest more directly toward organizations and activism, since married women were prohibited from teaching in public schools.
In Buffalo, Talbert found many women to join with in addressing cultural and social concerns. She became a charter member and later president of the Phyllis Wheatley Club in 1899, an affiliate of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); founder and president of the Empire State Federation of Colored Women, which focused on prison reform from 1911 to 1916; and president of the Christian Culture Congress. Talbert’s actions in confronting such issues as challenging an all-white board of commissioners for excluding African Americans from the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition earned her attention from the national NACW. She was elected president of NACW from 1916 to 1920. It was during her term as president that Anacostia, the home of Frederick Douglass in Washington, D.C., was purchased and restored. Talbert represented the NACW as a full member of the International Council of Women and addressed delegates in Christiana, Norway, in 1920. She also founded the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World in 1921, and worked tirelessly with the NAACP.
Talbert championed support of World War I efforts and fair treatment of African American soldiers, and from 1918 to 1923, she was elected vice president and board member of the NAACP. As vice president, Talbert was national director of the antilynching campaign that supported the Dyer Antilynching Bill. Although the bill was never passed by Congress, Talbert was able to organize the raising of enough funds to advertise a listing of the atrocities of lynching. This helped increase the support of many whites and empowered new female voters to support the bill.
Talbert committed her time and energy as an organizer, activist, and promoter of human rights for people of color throughout her life. She advocated for causes that were both national and international, and was honored in 1922, with the most prestigious recognition as the first woman to be awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. Talbert died of coronary thrombosis at her home in Buffalo, New York.—Lean’tin L. Bracks
TARRY, ELLEN
(September 26, 1906–September 23, 2008) Children’s writer, autobiographer, biographer, journalist
Considered a minor figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Ellen Tarry contributed to the New York Amsterdam News, was active in Catholic social activist organizations in Harlem, and is considered a pioneer in African American children’s literature.
Tarry was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 26, 1906, to John Tarry, a barber and deacon in the First Congressional Church, and Eula Meadows Tarry, a seamstress. In 1921, after the death of her father, she attended St. Francis de Sales, a Catholic boarding school in Virginia, where she converted to Catholicism. The social mission of Catholicism spoke to her and would increasingly become part of her work, as she was a contributor to Commonweal and Catholic World, examining issues that she felt to be obstacles to African Americans embracing the Catholic Church.
Tarry returned to Alabama and studied at the State Normal School for Negroes with plans to teach; she held several teaching positions in Birmingham and wrote for the Birmingham Truth in a regular column entitled “Negroes of Note,” which explored African American heritage, celebrated key figures, and condemned racial segregation. In 1929, she decided to pursue writing full time, moved to New York and joined the Negro Writers’ Guild, and befriended fellow writer Claude McKay. Committed to using her writing to promote racial justice, Tarry attended the Cooperative School for Student Teachers on scholarship from 1937 to 1939, where she studied writing literature for children.
In New York, Tarry was also active in the Roman Catholic intellectual circles and the Friendship House missionary project, led by Catherine de Hueck. She regularly lectured at the Friendship House on racial injustice and assisted in opening a Chicago branch. Tarry was committed to promoting Catholic race relations and desegregating the Catholic Church. She was briefly married and had a daughter in 1944. She worked for the National Catholic Community Service, the USO, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
During her teaching years, Tarry recognized the dearth of children’s literature, examining urban life from a realistic point of view. By the end of the 1940s, she had published three books that were favorably received. Her first book, Janie Bell (1940), examines an African American child who has been abandoned and the white nurse who adopts her. Hezekiah Horton (1942) tells the tale of a young African American boy and his love of cars, which he must admire from afar, until he develops a friendship with Mr. Ed and his convertible. My Dog Rinty (1946)—cowritten with Marie Hall Els—is the story of a young African American boy who is assisted by kind white strangers in finding his lost dog. Her last children’s book, The Runaway Elephant (1950), is based on an actual news story and reunites readers with Hezekiah and Mr. Ed. Tarry avoided stereotypes, and the innocent interracial friendships in her texts seem simple but were shocking and groundbreaking for the time period; she desired to improve race relations by promoting such interactions as normal.
In addition to children’s books, Tarry wrote biographies of figures whose stories were neglected. These include Saint Katherine Drexel: Friend of the Oppressed (1958), Martin De Porres: Saint of the New World (1963), Young Jim: The Early Years of James Weldon Johnson (1967), and The Other Toussaint: A Modern Biography of Pierre Toussaint, a Post-Revolutionary Black (1981).
In 1955, Tarry published her autobiography, The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Woman, in which she uses her own life story to explore and document the impact of such issues as segregation, racism, and the Great Depression on the African American community, while remaining optimistic about the future. She also continued her campaign against religious prejudice as a Catholic and presented the internal conflicts of color and passing within an economic system in which class and race were entwined. Fully active late in life and honored as a “living legend,” Tarry died in New York City.—Adenike Marie Davidson
TAYLOR [WILLIAMS], EVA [IRENE GIBBONS]
(January 22, 1895–October 31, 1977) Blues and vaudeville singer, stage actress
Born into a family of twelve children in St. Louis, Missouri, Irene Gibbons became a performer at an early age and traveled nationally and internationally with a vaudeville troupe under her stage name, Eva Taylor. While still a teenager, she appeared as a chorus girl in a 1911 production featuring entertainment legend Al Jolson. By her mid-twenties, she had met and married Clarence Williams, a noted pianist, singer, songwriter/composer, arranger, bandleader, theatrical producer, promoter, and music publisher during the Harlem Renaissance era, and settled in New York City to continue an active singing career with her husband’s trio and “Blue Five” groups, as well as other theatrical revues and productions.
Taylor successfully raised three sons, maintained her marriage and professional relationships with Williams, and made her own mark in show business with her husband and such other Harlem Renaissance entertainers as Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, Florence Mills, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Joe “King” Oliver, and Cab Calloway. She recorded for Columbia, Black Swan, Okeh, Victor, Edison, and other companies; was the first African American female soloist to broadcast on national and international radio networks; and hosted her own radio program during the 1930s.
After her husband’s death in 1965, Taylor spent her final years in New York and was interred next to him upon her death. Their grandson, Clarence Williams III, went on to have a notable career as a television and movie actor.—Fletcher F. Moon
TERRELL, MARY CHURCH [MARY ELIZA CHURCH]
(September 23, 1863–July 14, 1954) Educator, clubwoman, writer, activist, public speaker
Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell was born in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, and died in 1954, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. By the end of World War I, she was already fifty-five years old. Thus, at the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, she had obtained a college degree, taught, traveled, and published.
Terrell had an exceptional childhood and education for a person of color in the nineteenth century. She was born Mary Eliza Church in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 23, 1863. She was the eldest child of Louisa (Ayers) Church and Robert Reed Church, both former slaves. With her family’s aid, Mary received an excellent education, followed by extended travel in Europe. After obtaining her undergraduate degree, her father urged her to settle down for a life of leisure in his home, but Terrell wanted to work for the uplift of African Americans and women, and she braved her father’s disapproval to do so. She married Robert Heberton Terrell in October 1891. They had one child.
During Terrell’s long and notable life, she worked tirelessly to improve the social, economic, and political conditions for African Americans. Her excellent education equipped her for a career that began with teaching and continued with leadership positions in the Colored Women’s League and later the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). She became founding president of NACW in 1895. Terrell worked vigorously for women’s suffrage and women’s rights, particularly black women’s rights. She was an internationally known speaker and lecturer, a widely published writer, a member of numerous boards and associations, and a founding member of a church in Washington, D.C. The educator and activist was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In 1920, Terrell was asked by the Republican National Committee to be the supervisor of the work among black women in the Eastern United States. Her assignment was to talk with women’s groups about exercising their newly acquired right to vote by supporting the Republican Party platform. Terrell continued to work with the Republican Party, campaigning in 1929, for Ruth Hannah McCormick, who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. senator from Illinois. In 1932, Terrell served as an advisor to the Republican National Committee during the Herbert Hoover presidential campaign. During the intervening years, she was active with the party, helping in whatever ways she could. She remained an active member of the Republican Party until she joined the presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson, a Democrat.
Terrell led and won the fight to desegregate Washington, D.C., a struggle that was finally resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953, just a year before her death. Many of the major players—statesmen, politicians, teachers, and literati—in the century after the Civil War were Terrell’s personal friends or acquaintances, including Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Numerous other noted African American leaders worked alongside Terrell in “racial uplift” endeavors.
In 1940, the culmination of Terrell’s writing career involved the publication of her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, with a preface by H. G. Wells. In this work, she traces her life from her early childhood days, emphasizing her experiences growing up and living in a white-dominated America. She dedicated much of the book to the discussion of the community activism in which she had been involved for much of her life.—Debra Newman Ham
THOMAS, EDNA LEWIS
(1886–July 22, 1974) Actress, activist
Edna Lewis Thomas, a leader in the black theater movement of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the most popular members of A’Lelia Walker’s social circle and a close friend to Carl Van Vechten. She also acted in hundreds of vaudeville, black theater, and Broadway plays, and was a proponent of racial uplift through activism.
Thomas was born in Lawrenceville, Virginia, in 1886, before moving to Boston. At the age of sixteen, she married the son of J. H. Lewis, although he later died of tuberculosis. Thomas returned to school to study music before working as social secretary and tutor to Madame C. J. Walker. Through Walker, Edna met her second husband, Lloyd Thomas.
Thomas’s talent for acting and singing was discovered by the Lafayette Players during her performance in a benefit for J. Rosamond Johnson’s music school. In 1920, she accepted the lead role in Confidence, which launched her prolific career, involving more than 100 roles. During the span of nearly thirty years, Thomas acted with the Lafayette Players, the Ethiopian Art Theater, the Alhambra Players, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theater. She also appeared on Broadway. In addition, she made appearances in movies and on the radio. By 1936, Thomas caught the attention of Orson Welles, who cast her as Lady Macbeth in his WPA Federal Theater adaptation of Macbeth. In 1947, she appeared in A Streetcar Named Desire and its subsequent revivals, including the 1951 film. During the course of her career, Thomas was a proponent for civil rights. She worked as an administrative assistant and acting head supervisor for the WPA Federal Theater Project, was on the board of directors for the Negro Playwrights Company, and was a founding leader of the Negro Actors’ Guild.
Between 1967 and 1968, Thomas lost the two people closest to her: Olivia Wyndham and Lloyd Thomas. The three had lived together since the 1920s. Thomas died of heart disease in New York.—Amanda J. Carter
THOMPSON, CLARA ANN
(1869–March 20, 1949) Poet, lecturer, teacher
During the 1920s, Clara Ann Thompson wrote and presented readings of her poetry, works whose themes echo those addressed by black female writers of the period. She was the daughter of former slaves John Henry Thompson and Clara Jane Gray Thompson. She was born in Rossmoyne, Ohio, one of five children. Two of her siblings, Priscilla Jane and Aaron Belford, wrote and published poetry; another brother, Garland Yancey, was a sculptor. Clara was educated at the Amity School and by a private tutor. She lived most of her life with her sister, Priscilla, and her brother, Garland. Thompson’s time was spent writing poetry and holding readings; she published two volumes of poetry. Her membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Baptist church, and Young Women’s Christian Association indicate her social consciousness and commitment to politics and religion.
Thompson’s first volume of poems, Songs from the Wayside, was published in 1908, and dedicated to Priscilla and Garland. In this collection appear “Uncle Rube on the Race Question,” “Uncle Rube’s Defense,” and “Uncle Rube to the Young People.” Uncle Rube is a wise old man who speaks in dialect to a silent white man and is similar to Charles Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius McAdoo and Langston Hughes’s Alberta K. Johnson. His broken English marks him as unlettered and disguises his wisdom. By using this masking technique, Uncle Rube, like Alberta K. Johnson, makes astute observations about race relations. Thompson shared with Hughes a veracity that was not one sided. Uncle Rube knows that the black man also has weaknesses and faults, and needs to be free to act without having to answer to another or have his actions monitored.
In addition to the Uncle Rube poems, there are occasional and seasonal poems, including “Memorial Day,” “The Christmas Rush,” “The Easter Light,” and “The Autumn Leaves.” Thompson’s use of dialect is not limited to Uncle Rube; a poem like “Mrs. Johnson Objects” has the dialect, monologue, and racial criticism found in the Uncle Rube poems. Just as the poet comments on the issue of race, she also addresses Christianity, both the preaching and the practice. The promise and hope in Christianity is sung in “Not Dead, But Sleeping,” “Out of the Deep: A Prayer,” and “I Follow Thee.” “Lost Love,” “Parted,” and “If Thou Shouldest Return” are poems that allude to love and relations, and are contemporaneous in theme with those by such writers as Georgia Douglas Johnson.
Thompson’s second volume of poetry, A Garland of Poems, was published by a Boston press and reflects the social conditions of the twentieth century and the human condition. A Garland of Poems includes poems about black men in World War I, for example, “Our Soldiers” and “Our Heroes”; religion, for instance, “Consecration” and “Communion Prayer”; and elegies, with “Life and Death” and “Our Deceased Leader” being examples. Here, Thompson uses dialect, gives advice, makes observations about race relations, and writes about the human condition—its foibles and pain.
Thompson spent her later years in Cincinnati, living with a niece and serving as a catechism instructor at St. Andrews Episcopal Church, Mt. Healthy. She is buried in the Colored American Cemetery in Oakley, Ohio.—Helen R. Houston
THOMPSON, ELOISE ALBERTA VERONICA BIBB
(June 28, 1880–January 8, 1928) Writer, journalist
The writings of Eloise Alberta Veronica Bibb Thompson are important in the African American literary tradition seen during the Harlem Renaissance. Her works reflect her faith in her race and her opposition to the racial inequality that she saw in American society.
Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on June 28, 1880, the only child of Charles H. and Catherine Adele Bibb. While still a teenager, she published her first book of verse, Poems (1895), and dedicated it to her contemporary, writer Alice Ruth Moore [Dunbar]. Thompson studied at Oberlin College Preparatory Academy from 1899 to 1901, and then returned to New Orleans, where she taught school for two years. She entered the Teacher’s College at Howard University and graduated in 1908. From 1908 to 1911, she was head resident at the Colored Social Settlement in Washington. She married Noah Davis Thompson, a prominent journalist, in 1911, and the couple relocated to California.
A rising star, Thompson held positions with the Evening Express, the Morning Tribune, and the Liberator. She was also a feature writer for the Morning Sun and Los Angeles Tribune, and as a freelance writer, contributed articles to Out West, Tidings, and other magazines. Around 1915, Thompson turned to playwriting and short fiction. Her concern for racial issues led her to write the play A Reply to the Clansmen, a response to Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansmen, on which filmmaker D. W. Griffith based his controversial film The Clansmen, later renamed The Birth of a Nation. Her play, however, was never produced.
During the early 1920s, Thompson produced three plays: Caught, Africans, and Cooped Up. They were staged in New York and California. When Africans (sometimes cited as Africannus) was staged in Los Angeles, it was the first play about an African country written by a black author designed for a black audience and realized by an all-black cast. Thompson’s concern for racial issues was seen in her short fiction, as well as her plays. Two of her short stories, “Mademoiselle Tasie—A Short Story” and “Masks,” were published in Opportunity magazine in 1925 and 1927, respectively. In 1927, the Thompsons relocated to New York City, where Noah became business manager for Opportunity. A year later, Eloise died suddenly. Opportunity referred to her work as among the best of its new writers.—Jessie Carney Smith
THOMPSON, ERA BELL [DAKOTA DICK]
(August 10, 1906–December 29, 1986) Writer, activist
Era Bell Thompson was a writer, editor, feminist, and trailblazing African American female journalist who flourished toward the latter years of the Harlem Renaissance era. She was born on August 10, 1906, in Des Moines, Iowa, to Stewart C. and Mary Logan Thompson. She enjoyed her Iowan childhood but, by 1914, moved with her family to Driscoll, North Dakota, to a farm. Her father then worked as a private messenger for Governor Lynn Frazier from 1917 to 1921. Two years after Thompson’s mother died in 1918, she moved to Bismarck with her father, who operated a secondhand store.
Thompson attended Mandan High School for a few years before graduating from Bismarck High School in 1924. While attending the University of North Dakota from 1925 to 1927, she wrote for the school newspaper, the Dakota Daily Student, and excelled in athletics, setting five state intercollegiate women’s track records and tying two. Due to poor health, Thompson had to leave school before graduating. The next year, her father died, and she returned to Bismarck to run his store until she was able to pay off his debts. In 1930, Thompson won twenty-five dollars in a bedspring-naming contest, which enabled her to visit friends in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In Grand Forks, she met Methodist pastor Reverend Robert E. O’Brian. When O’Brian became president of Morningside College, Thompson moved with his family to Sioux City, Iowa. In 1931, she was awarded the Wesleyan Service Guild Scholarship, which helped her return to college. Two years later, she graduated from Morningside College with a B.A. in social science and returned to Chicago.
Between 1933 and 1942, work was difficult to find in Chicago, so Thompson held a variety of odd jobs, beginning with the Settlement House under Mary McDowell. She later held various domestic positions, interspersed with working for the Illinois Occupational Survey, Works Progress Administration, Chicago Department of Public Works, Chicago Relief Administration, and Chicago Board of Trade. During this time, she was a correspondent for the Chicago Defender and would sometimes write in the “Lights and Shadows” column under the pseudonym Dakota Dick. Thompson also published an in-house newspaper during her time with the Works Progress Administration. From 1938 to 1940, she conducted postgraduate studies at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. In 1942, Thompson became an interviewer for the United States and Illinois State Employment Services.
By 1945, Thompson had received a Newberry Library fellowship to write her autobiography, American Daughter, published in 1946. Her unique experiences as an African American Midwesterner caught the attention of John H. Johnson, publisher of Negro Digest and Ebony magazine. In 1947, she was persuaded by Johnson to join Johnson Publishing Company. Thompson held the position of associate editor of Negro Digest until 1951. She also wrote articles for Negro Digest, including the March 1951 article “Girl Gangs of Harlem.” She then became the comanaging editor of Ebony until 1964, when she was promoted to international editor. Although she was semiretired after 1970, Thompson held the position until her death on December 29, 1986. She is buried in a family plot in Driscoll.
While working with Ebony magazine, Thompson, who is credited with using her unique perspective and insight on racial attitudes in various societies to promote racial understanding, published more than forty byline articles and visited 124 countries on six continents. In 1949, she was awarded the Bread Loaf Writer’s Fellowship. In 1954, she published another book based on her tour of eighteen African countries, Africa, Land of My Father. By 1961, Thompson held a National Press Club citation. In 1963, she and another Ebony editor, Herbert Nipson, edited and published a collection of essays featuring such figures as William Faulkner and Jack Dempsey: White on Black: The Views of Twenty-Two White Americans on the Negro. These essays demonstrate attitude changes witnessed in Ebony during the mid-twentieth century. Two years later, Thompson was given the Iota Phi Lambda Outstanding Woman of the Year award and a honorary degree from Morningside College. Her August 1966 Ebony article entitled “What Weaker Sex?” demonstrates her avid feminism, while her September 1971 essay “I Was a Cancer Coward” shares her personal struggle with breast cancer and the experience of having a radical mastectomy. She hoped to help relieve fears of other women going through the same ordeal.
In 1968, Thompson was given Society of Midland Authors’ Patrons Saints Award for American Daughter, and one year later she was granted a honorary degree from the University of North Dakota. From 1968 through 1976, she was featured in various Backstage columns and honored by Driscoll, North Carolina, in 1972. Thompson won the Distinguished Alumni Award from Morningside College in 1974, as well as the Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider Award in 1976. The same year, she was inducted into the North Dakota Hall of Fame. Two years later, Thompson was inducted into the Iowa Hall of Fame and photographed and interviewed by Schlesinger Library for their black women’s oral history project, “Women of Courage.” Also in 1978, the University of North Dakota Cultural Center was named after her. By February 1986, Thompson had been selected as one of fifty black women to be featured in “Women of Courage,” an exhibit at the Chicago Public Library’s Cultural Center. The writer and activist was also interviewed for Fisk University’s Black Oral History Project, now preserved in Special Collections at the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library at Fisk University. Her papers are preserved at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library in Chicago.—Amanda J. Carter
THOMPSON, PRISCILLA JANE
(1871–1942) Poet
Priscilla Jane Thompson, one of three poets in a family of six children, wrote poetry that focuses on the true character of her race. She was born in Rossmoyne, Ohio, in 1871, and spent her entire life in that community. Thompson and her siblings, Aaron Belford and Clara Ann, self-published their work. Priscilla published her first volume of poetry, Ethiope Lays, in 1900, followed by a second volume, Gleanings of Quiet Hours, in 1907. This second volume contains many of the poems from the first collection. Thompson’s themes are inclusive of Christian faith, racial pride, morality, racial issues, and love. More than half of her work is in dialect. Even though it is not considered grammatically sound and “antiquated,” it was favorably received. No other collections of poetry by Thompson are known to exist, despite the fact that one can only assume she continued to write.—Lean’tin L. Bracks
THOMPSON PATTERSON, LOUISE ALONE
(September 9, 1901–August 27, 1999) Social activist
Louise Alone Thompson Patterson was an activist who devoted her life to fighting for equal rights for women and African Americans. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 9, 1901. Her family moved to the West Coast, eventually settling in Berkeley, California. Thompson Patterson attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with honors in 1923. While a student at Berkeley, she attended a lecture delivered by the renowned African American intellectual and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois and was so inspired that she decided to dedicate her life to fighting for race and gender equality.
After graduating, Thompson Patterson worked briefly at the Branch Normal College for Colored People (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff). From there she moved to Hampton Institute in Virginia, where she worked for five years. Uncomfortable with the racial conservatism at Hampton, she moved to New York City to study social work.
In Harlem, Thompson Patterson became involved with the artists, writers, and intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her Harlem apartment was a gathering spot for a group she called the “Vanguard.” Zora Neal Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, and other renaissance luminaries were frequent guests. Thompson Patterson married Wallace Thurman but left him six months later after learning he was gay. In 1938, she founded the short-lived Harlem Suitcase Theater with Langston Hughes.
In 1930, Thompson Patterson was a delegate to the World Conference against Racism and Anti-Semitism in Paris, France. That same year, she enrolled in the Communist Party’s Worker’s School in New York City. In 1932, she organized a group of twenty-two African American artists and writers who traveled to the Soviet Union to film Black and White, a movie about race discrimination in the United States. The African Americans were treated as international celebrities during their time in the Soviet Union. The movie, which was to be produced by a Soviet film company, was eventually canceled for artistic or diplomatic reasons that remain unclear. Thompson Patterson spent ten months traveling in Europe and Central Asia. In the mid-1930s, she set out for Spain in a gesture of solidarity with the antifascist forces fighting the civil war in that country.
Thompson Patterson actively supported the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine African American teenagers who had been accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. She led marches and rallies to generate support for the accused. The case generated worldwide attention. The International Labor Defense, an organization associated with the Communist Party, handled the young men’s appeals after they were convicted. Impressed by the Communist Party’s antiracist stance and work on the Scottsboro cases, Thompson Patterson joined the organization in 1933. She went to work for the International Workers’ Organization, a Communist-affiliated outfit that offered its members low-cost insurance and access to health clinics and educational activities.
In 1940, she married William L. Patterson, an African American lawyer who was head of International Labor Defense. After World War II ended, the Soviet Union and Communism were viewed as dangerous threats to American democracy. In 1948, the leaders of the American Communist Party were convicted and imprisoned for violating the Smith Act, a law that prohibited advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. Thousands of Americans were accused of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. When the government launched a red-baiting campaign against African American singer and actor Paul Robeson, Thompson Patterson was his vocal supporter.
At the peak of the McCarthy era’s “Red Scare,” Thompson Patterson and others founded Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a black leftist and feminist organization. In 1951, a group of Sojourners pushed their way into the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., demanding equality for African Americans. The Sojourners were mostly urban, middle-class, well-educated women with radical, leftist views, and they were unable to build a broad-based organization supported by working-class women. During the two-year lifespan of the group, it defied the Cold War political order. The Sojourners were seen as a subversive, Communist-influenced group. The government kept close tabs on members, and informants infiltrated the organization. Under mounting pressure from the government, the group disbanded.
Thompson Patterson maintained her ties to the Communist Party. In March 1971, when she was sixty-nine years of age, she organized support for Angela Davis, an African American professor who was a member of the Communist Party. Davis had been charged with murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping in connection with a failed prison escape in Marin County, California, in 1970. The Davis case became an international cause célèbre. In 1972, she was acquitted of all charges. Thompson Patterson remained a courageous activist until her death.—Leland Ware
THORNTON, WILLIE MAE “BIG MAMA”
(December 11, 1926–July 25, 1984) Blues singer
Like many of the artists, writers, and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton strove for and achieved an authenticity of voice that was a celebration of both herself and African American folk culture. She not only sang the blues, but she lived them in a career that spanned four decades. While some scholars suggest that Thornton was born three years before the “end” of the Harlem Renaissance, her work places her within that tradition. Like Bessie Smith and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, she brought sensuality and authenticity to her blues singing. Her daring stage presence, life on the road, and open lesbianism represent a freedom that few women enjoyed.
Thornton was born in the rural outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama, on December 11, 1926. With her father a minister and mother a choir member, she began her career as a gospel singer in her father’s church. When her mother died, Thornton began working in a local saloon, cleaning and later filling in for the regular singer. And it was as a singer that her musical prowess was recognized.
When she was fourteen years old, Thornton joined the Hot Harlem Revue. As a member of that group, she was billed as the “New Bessie Smith,” and she toured the Southeastern United States for seven years. Reflecting on her singing style, she would cite “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith as some of her chief influences.
In 1948, Thornton left the revue and settled for a while in Houston, where she was instrumental in the development of “Texas blues.” With Houston as her base, she made her first recordings, had a regular gig at the Bronze Peacock, and began touring the Chitlin’ Circuit, a collection of spots spanning from Harlem’s Cotton Club to the juke joints of Mississippi that were safe for African American musicians.
Along with singing, Thornton could play several musical instruments, a rarity that earned her a five-year contract with Peacock Records. In 1952, she performed in the Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and it was there that she earned the nickname “Big Mama.” Standing at six feet tall and weighing 250 pounds, “Big Mama” became a marketing sensation along the lines of “Ma” Rainey. In August 1952, while in Los Angeles, she became a music legend when she recorded “Hound Dog,” a twelve-bar blues laden with sexual references, with the Johnny Otis Rhythm and Blues Caravan. In that song, Thornton pays respect to the long tradition of field hollers that were part of the work songs in African American culture. Her version of “Hound Dog,” a song that was later covered by Elvis Presley, sold more than 2 million copies and topped the R&B charts in 1953. This song also established her legitimacy as one of the major figures in blues music history, along with blurring the boundaries between blues and rock and roll.
In the late 1950s, rock and roll surpassed rhythm and blues in the popular music landscape, and “Big Mama” moved to San Francisco, where she continued to perform. In the mid-1960s, the San Francisco Bay Area was emerging as a hotbed for blues music as a result of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, and Thornton continued to support herself as a musician. In 1965, she toured Europe as part of the American Folk Blues Festival. In the late 1960s, Janis Joplin extended Thornton’s musical influence when she covered her “Ball and Chain,” making the Thornton original a part of her musical repertoire. And she always had an open invitation to the Monterey Jazz Festival.
The latter part of Thornton’s life is a testament to her creativity and the respect she fostered among musicians. She was a blues woman who lived an unconventional life, and the result was varied opportunities to see the world and bring African American folk culture to as wide an audience as possible. The little girl from Alabama had indeed become the “Big Mama,” bringing the sounds of the South and African American folk culture to a broad audience. In the late 1960s, Thornton made three influential recordings: “Big Mama in Europe” (1966), “Big Mama Thornton with the Chicago Blues Band” (1967), and “Ball and Chain” (1968). She was one of the first blues women to travel outside the United States, and she performed in venues that included such performers as Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Santana. These distinctions were the result of her musical talent. Thornton’s influence on Joplin is particularly poignant. Like Thornton, Joplin both sang and played musical instruments; Joplin was one of the bridges between blues and rock music, and her style built upon the foundation set down by “Big Mama” Thornton.
Thornton endured and continues to endure as one of the most prominent voices in blues history because of her voice; it was and remains a voice of substance. She was no flash, and in her forty-year career, she influenced Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, and Stevie Nicks, to name just a few. Thornton died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, in 1984. A life of hard drinking finally caught up to her, and she was laid to rest in Inglewood Park Cemetery. That same year, she was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame.
While “Ma” Rainey was often called the “Mother of the Blues,” and Bessie Smith was widely recognized as the “Empress of the Blues,” “Big Mama” Thornton acquired the unofficial moniker the “Heart of the Blues.” Thornton had a big voice that was full of gusto, and the words she sang came from experience. In interviews, she often explained that no one taught her music, and that she learned to sing and play the harmonica, as well as the drums, through observation. But it was more than observation that made Thornton one of the most important blues singers of the Harlem Renaissance era. It was her ability to infuse music with her unique soul and personality that makes her one of the most memorable and revered figures in the history of blues music.—Delano Greenidge-Copprue
TURNER, LUCY MAE
(1884–?) Poet, essayist, educator
Although she has received little recognition, Lucy Mae Turner is noted as one of the last black poets of the Harlem Renaissance to publish a collection of dialect verse. Born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1884, this granddaughter of Nat Turner, the slave-revolt leader, lived a modest life on her family’s farm. Her father Gilbert, who was previously enslaved in Virginia, married Sarah Ellen Jones, daughter of a local Baptist minister. The couple had four children, but Lucy Mae and her older sister Fannie were the only ones to survive past infancy.
After high school, Turner left Zanesville to attend Wilberforce University, and she earned her degree in 1908. Shortly thereafter, she began teaching in East St. Louis public schools, notably the James Weldon Johnson School. She and Fannie purchased a home together, and their mother eventually moved in with Fannie. Turner went on to earn a B.S. from Ohio State University in 1934, and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1942. When St. Louis University began to admit black students into its law school, she enrolled and earned her law degree in 1950. Despite her impressive academic record, she was not granted admittance to the Illinois Bar Association and could not practice law.
On August 1, 1938, Turner published her only collection of poetry, entitled ’Bout Culled Folkses. The volume features thirty-eight poems written in dialect, as well as Standard English. The influence of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life on Turner’s style is evident throughout the book, particularly in such dialect verses as “Pay Day,” “Ebenezer,” and “Evahbody’s Got Troubles.” She ends the volume with “Nat Turner, an Epitaph,” which corresponds with black writers’ recurrent use of revolt leaders in 1930s and 1940s literature. Beatrice M. Murphy, book reviewer for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, offered a favorable review of ‘’Bout Culled Folkses and invited Turner to publish “A Bird Is Singing” in the anthology Negro Voices, also published in 1938. Turner’s inclusion in the anthology illustrates her short-lived recognition as a race poet among the likes of Langston Hughes, Frank Marshall Davis, and Lucia Mae Pitts.
In 1955, the Negro History Bulletin published Turner’s essay “The Family of Nat Turner, 1831–1954” in its March and April issues. Written forty years after her father’s death, the essay chronicles his life following Nat Turner’s insurrection and execution. Anecdotes about her father’s later years in Marietta and Zanesville, both cities in Ohio, reveal a resilient man who worked diligently to secure employment in the field of iron manufacturing, overcome illiteracy, and become a pillar of his family’s integrated community. To conclude the essay, Turner recalls the frequency with which her parents opened their home to formerly enslaved individuals who were in need of food and shelter. It was at the feet of her father and their guests where Turner became intrigued by the narratives and voices of slavery that would, one day influence the themes and language of her poetry. Her exact birth date, marital status, and cause of death are unknown.—Tanya E. Walker