Black History Month Icon #3 - Juan de Pareja

Juan de Pareja

Juan de Pareja was born in 1610 to Moorish indentured servants. De Pareja was bestowed to painter  Diego Velázquez in a will. De Pareja acted as Velázquez's assitant, working with him in his studio. Velázquez noticed Juan's talent for painting and took him under his wing prefecting his techniques and skill. 

While de Pareja was Velázquez's slave, he was treated with the utmost respect. He traveled with Velázquez Velázquez to Italy to help accquire Venetian paintings for the King of Spain. Unfortunately there are many negative myths surrounding Velázquez and de Pareja's relationship. Some have said that Velázquez refused to teach de Pareja painting and learned from watching him; de Pareja was able to showcase his art to the King of Spain and convinced him to free him. But Velázquez loved de Pareja, enough to manumit him in 1654 and allow him to make a living through his art. 

Velázquez even painted a portrait of de Pareja, and hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I always loved this painting because it showed de Pareja with dignity and respect. Other Black art subjects of the time were treated as exotic others, and not with the same respect and care as other art subjects were. 

Black History Month Icon #2 - Fredi Washington

Fredi Washington

Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington  was born on December 23, 1903 in Savannah, Georgia. Washington began her career in New York to pursue studies in including dance and theatre. acting. Her first big success in the theatre was in the play Black Boy, where she plays a young Black woman who passes for White. Audiences were intrigued by Washington, with fair skin and green eyes she was a Black woman who could be mistaken for White. As time went on all of the acting roles in Washington's career centered around her being typecast in such roles. Washington emerged as "the archetypal tragic mulatto for the Depression era."


Her most remembered and exemplary role of a "Tragic Mulatto" character was in the 1934 film Imitation of Life. Washington played Peola, the fair-skinned daughter of the Black cook who desperately yearned for the privileges and fair treatment that escaped her because of her race. So to get them, she had to not only pass for White, but totally disown her mother. Her honest, almost surreal performance eclipses the main plot involving Claudette Colbert's character Beatrice Pullman' rise from poverty into a self made woman (mostly with the help of her Black friend's pancake recipe) and the love triangle that develops between herself, her lover Stephen and her daughter Jessie.


But Hollywood was not ready for Ms. Washington. She was not dark skinned enough to play the mammies and maids roles that persisted Black actresses at the time. And when offers came for her to pass for white, she rejected them; and when she did get roles where her love interest was Black, like Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones she was forced to put on heavy darkening make up as not to confuse or anger patrons who might mistake her for white woman in the film. She said once to a newspaper, "I don't want to pass because I can't stand insincerities and shams. I am just as much Negro as any of the others identified with the race."  She was upfront about her racial pride and desire to be accepted as both Black and a talented actress, "I have never tried to pass for white and never had any desire, I am proud of my race." In 'Imitation of Life', I was showing how a girl might feel under the circumstances but I am not showing how I felt."


Washington also helped Black actors contemporaries by founding the Negro Actors Guild of America, which  was devoted to challenging the entertainment industry’s narrow  and racist representations of African Americans. She worked to encourage the creation of better, more realistic roles for people of color and the elimination of stereotypical characters and scenes from the film and theater marketplace. In addition, Washington worked with the NAACP on behalf of actors. She also helped Lena Horne start her career and served as a casting consultant for Carmen Jones and  George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Washington later left show business altogether and married a dentist named Anthony H. Bell and had children. On June 28th, 1994 Washington died after a series of several strokes in Stamford, Connecticut at the age of 90.

Black History Month: 29 Days of 29 Black Icons

To celebrate Black History Month, each day of the month I will share and discuss a Black person of interest in no particular order, both famous and obscure. 


Black Icon #1.  Danitra Vance

Danitra Vance was born in Chicago on July 13, 1954.  In 1985 Vance became the first African-American woman to join the cast of Saturday Night Live as a repertory player and predated major Black SNL female cast members like Ellen Cleghorn and Maya Rudolph. To date, she has been the only openly Lesbian cast member of Saturday Night Live. Vance's tenure at SNL was an extremely frustrating one, often being delegated to playing a domestic, nurse, or a secretary roles in sketches and limited writing chances. Vance also hated being compared to other her comedienne comtemporaries like Whoopi Goldberg believing that "makes it seem as if there can only be one of us at a time."


Her two most memorable roles on Saturday Night Live was a parody of the tv series That Girl called That Black Girl; where she played Latoya Marie, a young Black actress trying to make it in show bussiness. Her other notable recurring character was Carbini Green Harlem Watts Jackson, a seventeen year old mother of two who dispenses advice. She also performed the song, "I Play the Maids," a parody of Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" that expresssed Black actresses' dissatisfaction with being typcasted as "the help" in films in television. At the end of the 1986 season of Saturday Night Live, Vance decided to leave. 


Where Vance was stifled creatively in SNL, she thrived on stage. She won an NAACP Image Award and Obie award in Spunk, George C. Wolfe's stage adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston short stories and later in Wolfe's Dramatists Guild Award winning play The Colored Museum. In 1990 Vance was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. She underwent a single masectomy, turning the experience into a critically acclaimed one woman show, The Radical Girl's Guide to a Radical Mastectomy. Sadly the cancer recurred in 1993 and died at her grandather's home on August 21, 1994 in Markham, Illinois.

Vance as Miss Pat in the "Exhibit 1: Git on Board" Sketch from The Colored Museum