Dizzy Gillespie jamming at the Royal Roost in New York, 1948
Singer and showgirl Lola Falana and her husband singer Feliciano “Butch” Tavares c. 1970s
New York City. 1962. Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and their children protest at a CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) peace demonstration.
Los Angeles, 1966
Exhibition: Gordon Parks: Centennial at the Jenkins Johnsons, San Francisco. February 21 - April 27, 2013
In celebration of the 100th birthday of Gordon Parks, one of the most influential African American photographers of the 20th century, Jenkins Johnson Gallery in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation presents Gordon Parks: Centennial, on view from February 21 through April 27, 2013. Gordon Parks, an iconic photographer, writer, composer, and filmmaker, would have turned 100 on November 30, 2012. This will be the first solo exhibition for Parks on the West Coast in thirteen years. The exhibition will survey works spanning six decades of the artist’s career starting in 1940. The exhibition consists of more than seventy-five gelatin silver and pigment prints, including selections from Life magazine photo essays: Invisible Man, 1952; Segregation Story, 1956; The Black Panthers, 1970; and Flavio, 1960, about favelas in Brazil. Also included in the exhibition is his reinterpretation of American Gothic and his elegant depictions of artists like Alexander Calder, fashion models, and movie stars.
Rock and roll singer Jackie Wilson autographs the cuff of a Playboy Bunny at a dinner for the Motion Picture Pioneers Association at the Playboy Club on November 19, 1962 in New York, New York (x)
Hidden in the Open: A Photographic Essay of Afro American Male Couples
This is soo good! Trent Kelley has compiled over 100 images revealing a long legacy of Black male couples. These are some of my faves. Check out his flickr page for more amazing images.
The juke joints of the rural south featured blues and dancing and catered to the working class. Typically constructed with unfurnished walls and roofed with tin, they were usually open late at night and on weekends when patrons were likely to have spending money.
Leon James and Willa Mae Ricker demonstrate the Lindy Hop, 1942.
Floyd Norman, the first black artist at Disney, animating on Sleeping Beauty, 1958
Couple watching performance in a “flea circus”. Photographed by Rene Burri, New York c, 1959 (x)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIDNEY POITIER
February 20, 1927
“I’m OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was.”
BOARDING HOUSE BLUES | 1948
Vintage African American “Race” Movie Poster
Directed by Josh Binney and featuring an all-black cast headed by the Moms Mabley. Because films like this were aimed specifically at segregated inner-city black audiences, they were treated like disposable product by the studios, which offered them a surprising amount of leeway in terms of material. Drug jokes and sexual innuendos, which would surely have been censored in mainstream films in 1948, rub elbows with some truly bizarre novelty acts
