Ma Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” who also helped shape what would become rock ’n’ roll, launched her career from New Orleans. Rainey was one of the few out lesbians in music at the time and ...

When friends ask what led to her debut book, “Nickelodeons and Black Vaudeville: The Forgotten Story of Amanda Thorp,” author Kathi Clark Wong explains that it happened by accident. Wong has ...

The Black queer icon who spied on Nazis, flew a WWII plane, ... Baker’s formative years in vaudeville taught her not only how to leverage sex appeal, but also the art of satire.

Harold Nicholas, the younger member of the dazzling tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers, died Monday in Manhattan. He was 79. The cause was heart failure following surgery, said Bruce Goldstein, a ...

Archivists at USC and the University of Chicago went through boxes of silent film prints acquired from a collector in Louisiana and found a 30-second reel of two Black vaudeville performers, Saint ...

Entertainment Academy unearths long-lost ‘race films’ in Black cinema exhibit. The exhibition is a major event for the Academy, which in recent years has had to navigate accusations of a lack ...

Digitization of Series 1: Photographic Negatives, Photographs, and Slides was made possible by Andrew and Anya Shiva. Collection items available for reproduction, but the Archives Center makes no ...