Enlightened Free Thinking Nubian Kings And Queens

Samuel George Davis Jr. was born on December 8, 1925 in Harlem, New York. His parents, Sammy Davis Sr., an African American, and Elvera Sanchez, a Cuban American, were both vaudeville dancers.  They separated when young Davis was three years old and his father took him on tour with a dance troupe led by Will Mastin. Davis joined the act at a young age and they became known as the Will Mastin Trio. It was with this trio that Davis began a lucrative career as a dancer, singer, comedian, actor, and a multi-instrumentalist. During World War II Davis joined the army, he joined an integrated entertainment Special Services unit, and found that while performing the crowd often forgot the color of the man on stage. After his discharge from the army Davis rejoined the Will Mastin Trio and soon became known in Las Vegas as the kid in the middle.  On November 19, 1954, with the act in Las Vegas finally getting off the ground, he was involved in a serious car accident on a trip from L...

Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago, Illinois, was born on April 15, 1922, to Roy Washington, a lawyer, Methodist minister and one of the first black precinct captains in Chicago.  Washington’s mother Bertha Washington was a well-known singer in the city.  Washington attended segregated public schools including the newly completed DuSable High School where he set records as a track star.  Despite that success, Washington dropped out of high school at the end of his junior year and worked in a meat packing plant until his father helped him obtain a job at the U.S. Treasury office in Chicago.  There he met Dorothy Finch, his future wife.  The couple married in 1941 when Harold Washington was 19 and Dorothy was 17.  They divorced  ten years later . In 1942 Washington was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent overseas as part of a segregated unit of the Air Force Engineers, then part of the U.S. Army.  Washington served...

Rosetta Tharpe was a groundbreaking, profoundly impacting American music history pioneer by pioneering the guitar technique that would eventually evolve into the rock and roll style played by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Eric Clapton. However, despite her great popularity and influence on music history, Sister Rosetta Tharpe was first and foremost a gospel musician. Born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Although the identity of her father is unknown, Tharpe's mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was a singer, mandolin player and evangelist. At the encouragement of her mother, Tharpe began singing and playing the guitar from a very young age, and was by all accounts a musical prodigy. She began performing onstage with her mother from the age of four.  By age six, she had joined her mother as a regular performer in a traveling evangelical troupe - before audiences all across the American South. By the mid-20s, Tharpe and her mother had settled in Chicago, Illi...

Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham was an African American entertainer. Though best known as a comedian, Markham was also a singer, dancer, and actor. His nickname came from a stage routine, in which he declared himself to be "Sweet Poppa Pigmeat". Dewey Pigmeat Markham was born April 18, 1904 in Durham, North Carolina. His family was the most prominent on their street, which was later officially renamed Markham Street. Running away from home in 1918, Markham began his career in traveling music and burlesque shows. He took up with a white showman he ambiguously referred to over the years as "Mr. Booker" owner of a "gilly carnival."  For a time he was a member of Bessie Smith's Traveling Revue in the 1920s and later appeared on burlesque bills with such comedy legends as Milton Berle, Red Buttons, and Eddie Cantor. He claims to have originated the Truckin' dance which became nationally popular at the start of the 1930s. Markham performed ...

Andraé Edward Crouch, was born on 1 July, 1942, in  Los Angeles, California . Crouch’s 70's legacy is one of the richest in the gospel genre, yet he has never appealed to the music’s purists. The conservative elements in gospel music have seen his incorporation of rock n roll showmanship and riffs as inappropriate at best, and blasphemy at worst. A gifted singer, songwriter and keyboard player, Crouch undertook a traditional apprenticeship by playing piano and singing in church. For son-of-a-preacher man Andrae, 'playing church' was a childhood equivalent of playing cowboys and Indians. By the age of eight brother and sister were amusing themselves with a pie tin for a tambourine and a commode for a platform. The games came to an abrupt end when one particularly exuberant 'service' ended with the commode breaking! At nine Andrae was converted through the preaching of his father. He remembers, "I sat there in the audience listening. When he gave the...

Rudolph Frank Moore , known as  Rudy Ray Moore , was an American comedian, musician, singer, film actor, and film producer.  He was perhaps best known as  Dolemite  (the name derived from the mineral  dolomite ), the uniquely articulate  pimp  from the 1975 film  Dolemite , and its sequels,  The Human Tornado  and  The Return of Dolemite .  The persona was developed during his earlier comedy records,  for which Moore has been called "the Godfather of Rap". Moore was born and raised in  Fort Smith, Arkansas , and eventually moved to  Cleveland, Ohio , and then  Milwaukee, Wisconsin . In Milwaukee, he preached in churches as well as worked as a  nightclub  dancer. He returned to Cleveland, working in clubs as a singer, dancer, and comedian, often appearing in character as  Prince DuMarr . He joined the  US Army  and served in an entertainment unit in Germany, where he w...

Paul Robeson was a famous African-American athlete, singer, actor, and advocate for the civil rights of people around the world. He rose to prominence in a time when segregation was legal in the United States, and Black people were being lynched by racist mobs, especially in the South. Born on April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul Robeson was the youngest of five children. His father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Lincoln University, and his mother came from an abolitionist Quaker family. Robeson's family knew both hardship and the determination to rise above it. His own life was no less challenging. In 1915, Paul Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers University. Despite violence and racism from teammates, he won 15 varsity letters in sports (baseball, basketball, track) and was twice named to the All-American Football Team. He received the Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year, belonged to the Cap & Skull Honor Society, and gradu...