Shin-Kickers from History: The Griffin Sisters and Vaudeville
In the 1910s, Emma and Mabel Griffin were a well lnown vaudeville act. Performing as the Griffin Sisters, they combined comedy routines with music and dance numbers. (Mabel was the straight woman. Emma got the punchlines.)
They had started working as chorus girls in variety shows in the 1890s. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they were a recognized act on the white vaudeville circuit. They earned good money—sometimes as much as $200 a week.* (Though still not as much as comparable White performers.) But, like other Black performers of the period, Jim Crow laws meant their travel and booking arrangements were often difficult.
In the 1910s, they increasingly performed for Black audiences eager for entertainment. (Performing for Black audiences didn’t lessen the difficulties of traveling in the South.) It was a conscious business decision. They worked to expand Black vaudeville circuits, particularly into the South. In 1913, they founded their own theatrical agency, with the goal of getting Black performers the same terms as their white counterparts. They leased theaters in Chicago and Washington, as the first step in building the Griffin Sisters Vaudeville circuit.
Their plans came to naught. The physical stress of constant traveling caught up with them. In 1913, Emma collapsed on stage. She was hospitalized for more than a month. In 1915, Mabel suffered from a stroke. They continued to perform when they could, but their performances were intermittent. Occasionally one sister had to join forces with another performer when the other could not perform until 1918, when Emma died of bronchitis at the age of 44.
They set the stage, so to speak, for the Black female performers, and theater owners, who followed them.
* Roughly $6000 today.
Calling All Citizen Archivists
Depending on where you hang out online or what news media you listen to, you may have heard a call from the National Archives Catalog for volunteers with the “superpower” of reading cursive to join their Citizen Archivist program.* Almost thirty thousand new catalogers signed-up in the week after the call went out—100 times their normal weekly sign-ups according to the folks at the National Archives. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more.
Reading handwritten documents from the past can be a challenge.** Signing up to be a Citizen Archivist is simple. No application is required. Just go to the website and follow the instructions to get started.
One of the things I find most appealing about the program are the curated “missions”: sets of documents related to a particular topic that need to be transcribed. The service records of Civil War nurses, for instance.*** Revolutionary War pension files. Or more recently, documents related to the work of the Warren Commission in 1963 and 1964.
It sounds like a wonderful way to dip your toes into the intriguing world of the archives. Future historians will thank you.
*Some of you with sharp memories may feel like you heard this story before. Last year I shared information about a push to transcribe Clara Barton’s papers at the Library of Congress as part of the Library’s By the People public transcription project, By the People. This year, By the People is hosting a transcribe-a-thon dedicated to the writings of Frederick Douglass on February 14, the day on which he chose to celebrate his birth. (Like many enslaved and formerly enslaved people, he did not know the exact date.)
So many ways to help historians of the future work with materials from the past.
**For that matter, reading modern handwritten documents can be a challenge, as anyone who has received a handwritten letter from me can attest. I really try to write legibly, but soon I’m focusing on the idea rather than my handwriting and all is lost. There is a reason I type most of my letters these days.
***It will surprise no one that this particular mission caught my imagination.
****
And speaking of the National Archives, I strongly recommend the organization’s blog: The Unwritten Record. A recent post tells the story of Matthew Henson, a Black explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on multiple expeditions to the Arctic. (Who knew? Not me!) Another is a round-up of links to materials in the archives related to the Six Triple Eight Postal Battalion, the subject of a new movie that I have not yet seen.
In Which I enter Black History Month via To Walk About in Freedom
There have been a lot of mixed messages coming from the Federal government about celebrating Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and the like since January 20. Even though President Trump has officially proclaimed February Black History Month, many agencies are canceling events related to theses “cultural celebrations.” (It’s possible this will have all be unwound by the time you read this. Things are moving quickly. )
As far as I’m concerned, February is Black History Month–and it is even more important to recognize than it was before. In honor of Black History Month, I plan to read as many of the books currently in my TBR piles that are related to the topic as I can. As always, I’ll bring you along for the ride.
The Saturday before the Martin Luther King holiday felt like the right time to start. And To Walk About in Freedom turned out to be the perfect first book for the project.
I will admit, I deliberately put off reading To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner by Carole Emberton. When it came out in 2022, I was deep into Nazis. I just couldn’t face adding America’s history of slavery and what I learned from Joyner to call the “long emancipation” to the mix in my head. Now I have no excuse. In fact, I feel that it is important at this moment in time to bear witness to a part of our history that we have tried to whitewash from the day of the Emancipation Proclamation onward.
During the Depression, a WPA program called the Federal Writers’ Project sent unemployed journalists, writers and teachers to interview formerly enslaved people as part of a larger program intended to document the lives of ordinary Americans. Priscilla Joyner was the subject of one of those interviews.
Emberton uses Joyner’s story as a structure to explore the collective experience of what she names the “charter generation of freedom,” people who experienced life on both sides of emancipation. She fills out the gaps in Joyner’s interview with information from other oral histories of the charter generation, census data, marriage licenses, and any other relevant document she could find. The result is both a powerful history of the “long emancipation” as it unfolded from the Civil War through the Great Depression and a vivid individual biography. Emberton specifically chose Priscilla Joyner as a subject because much of Joyner’s story was unusual, reminding the reader that Joyner was not simply an exemplar of a generation. In fact, Emberton urges us to remember that the individual stories collected by the Federal Writers’ Project “are not valuable solely because they represent some greater historical truth. Their stories are valuable because they were theirs, and because they chose to tell them, imperfectly, to an unlikely army of public historians thrown together in the midst of a global economic crisis by a government that had shown very little concern for the fate of ex-slaves since Reconstruction.”
In her final chapter, titled “The Book,” Emberton traces the use and abuse of the WPA interviews of formerly enslaved people by white historians who were determined to present a positive image of the treatment of enslaved people by their owners. It is a salutary reminder that history is written by people, and some of whom are willing to twist sources to support their own agendas. (And none of us are entirely objective.)
I strongly recommend To Walk About in Freedom. I found it to be an engaging read and a master class in re-examining sources to support a broader story.
My Black History Month reading is off to a good start!