Autrilla Scott, like Rosa Parks, protested Jim Crow laws and fought for civil rights through education, and social and political activism. 

Autrilla Scott (left) & Sunny Nash 

Autrilla Scott, like Rosa Parks, protested Jim Crow laws and fought for civil rights to change the world around her and to keep hope alive.  

I will miss Autrilla. She was a lovely person, a generous person with a goal to help other people. She, like Rosa Parks, lived through the era of Jim Crows laws and did not allow those racial restrictions to prevent her from living a satisfying life. In fact, like Rosa Parks, Autrilla Scott made great contributions in the city of Long Beach, California, toward removing barriers from the employment of both women and African Americans. "There was a Civil Rights Movement in California," Autrilla told me. "And I guess, I was a part of it."

BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way

Edited by Sunny Nash

(l-r, rear) Evelyn Knight, Patricia Lofland

Bobbie Smith, Alta Cooke, Carrie Bryant

Vera Mulkey, Wilma Powell, Doris Topsy-Elvord

(seated l-r) Autrilla Scott, Maycie Herrington

Dale Clinton & Lillie Mae Wesley (not present) 

Limited Edition, Collector's Package Includes: 
Book, DVD, Signed Portrait

Autrilla Scott is among those in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, a book of historical profiles about women who made a difference in the history of Long Beach, California, The Foreword was written by Carolyn Smith Watts, who developed the concept for the project when she assembled the group for a photograph that was later displayed at an exhibition in the main gallery of the Historical Society of Long Beach.

These civil rights pioneers were part of the Civil Rights Movement in Long Beach, a movement with which few outside of the area are familiar. 

In fact, most people do not associate California with the struggle for civil rights because Civil Rights Movement efforts were concentrated in the Deep South, where Jim Crow laws were entrenched and had prevailed for centuries. 

For some time, California had remained outside the range of race riots, until the San Francisco riot in 1966 and the Watts Riots in 1965, the year that one of these women, Bobbie Smith, arrived in Los Angeles for her new job and found the city on fire. Later she was the first black woman in Long Beach to hold a public office, when she was elected to the Long Beach United School District. I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with these remarkable women about five years ago.

BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way

Like Rosa Parks, Autrilla Scott and the other women of BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way broke ground in civil rights and the destruction of Jim Crow laws.

Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott

However, long before the Watts Riots, California, which also had a smattering of Jim Crow laws on its books, but had an abundance of racial intolerance. Autrilla told me about times that she was discriminated against in receiving services. Those types of issues could only be addressed through the Civil Rights Movement, initiated  by people like Autrilla Scott, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King and other individuals and events in the Deep South.

The women in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way are some of the first black women to hold certain corporate, governmental, political and business positions. For example, among them are the first black U.S. Chief Warfinger, the first black woman to chair a U.S. Defense Advisory Committee and the first black female Long Beach Vice Mayor. 

Martin Luther King
Montgomery Bus Boycott

One of these women marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. One of the women in this study, a clerk at the Tuskegee Airman School, became a nationally known historian of Tuskegee Airman History, collected by the University of California.

Like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Autrilla Scott struggled against Jim Crow laws and fought for civil rights

Autrilla Scott was born in the cotton town of Hope, Arkansas, in 1930, the youngest of seven children. This was the height of the depression and Jim Crow laws, making opportunities scarce for everyone and particularly for African American females like Autrilla's. However, her family's economic struggle did not match the hardships and desperation of most of their southern black and white contemporaries. "My father was in the importing and exporting business," Autrilla told me. "Using his wagon, my father picked up goods from other parts of the country that the trains brought to Hope and then he delivered them to local stores. It was a good living, but as black people, we faced the same discrimination as other black families in the community and across the South."

Autrilla's father died when she was nine years old, leaving the family without primary support, forcing her mother to become head of the family and, for the first time, working outside the home. Autrilla's siblings, too, then joined the ranks of their impoverished neighbors. "My mother also took in washing and ironing for other people to take care of us," Autrilla said. "She worked very hard to help us go to school. Our education was important to her. When I was in in teens, and in high school, I cleaned houses and babysat to help my mother pay the bills, but she insisted I stay in school and finish."

"When I was a young woman, the only way out of poverty," Autrilla told me, "Was  through education and hard work. That's how people can keep hope alive, even today." 

Autrilla Scott
Believed in Education

How to Be a High School Superstar:
A Revolutionary Plan to Get Into Co
(Google Affiliate Ad)

However, the schools available to Autrilla and other black students were segregated and many were inferior because of lack of funding. This was the same situation Rosa Parks had faced nearly two decades before in Alabama. Civil rights crawled very slowly in education and other institutions in rural areas, as well as rapidly growing U.S. urban pockets nationwide. In addition, civil rights were stymied by Jim Crow laws, lynching, terrorism, false imprisonment and prohibition of voting rights of African Americans. Civil rights did not change--could not have changed--without people like Autrilla Scott; Rosa Parks, 17 years older and Autrilla; Martin Luther King, just one year older than Autrilla; and so many others before her. 

Fighting the Good Fight:
The Story of the Dexter
Avenue King Memorial
(Google Affiliate Ad)

Autrilla and others in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way and around the nation were in the local trenches fighting for the same civil rights cause as those activists were fighting for on the national level. Local trenches, prevalent all over the country, made the Civil Rights Movement into a national movement and made a significant contribution to the success of that national movement. After all, the national movement that became the Montgomery Bus Boycott and whose victory in the courts began the dismantling Jim Crow laws, started as a local movement in Montgomery, Alabama, by a local woman named, Rosa Parks.

As a teenager, Autrilla Scott babysat Bill Clinton before he was William Jefferson Clinton.

Toddler Bill Clinton

During my interview with her, Autrilla told me how she met the man who would grow up to become the 42nd President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton. 

"When I was in my teens," Autrilla said. "I took work cleaning houses so that I could stay in school and help my mother. One day when I was cleaning Roger Clinton's apartment, he came home with a little boy about two or three years old. He introduced the baby to me as Billy and asked me if I could babysit the child for a short time while he and the child's mother, Virginia Blythe, went on a date. I told him yes, I could." 

Autrilla babysat the future president many times after their first meeting. "He was a good little boy," she said. "And I didn't mind taking care of him. He was polite and very smart. I knew even when he was quite young he would do something important with his life, but I have to admit I didn't know he would become President of the United States."

Bill Clinton
& Autrilla Scott

After Roger Clinton and Virginia Blythe married, Billy eventually took his stepfather's last name, becoming William Jefferson Clinton. Autrilla Scott and Bill Clinton never forgot each other and the two of them met many times after those long ago days back in a place called Hope. 

There are special people like Autrilla Scott whose hands and heart have affected the great and small and left them better. When I see Bill Clinton, I smile because I know some of the good in him has something to do with Autrilla. It has to be that way because Autrilla affected people that way. 

After she graduated from high school, Autrilla married Olen Scott and, in 1950, moved to California. She was 20 years old. The couple had two children and five grandchildren. "I found discrimination here in California," Autrilla said. "I knew that discrimination was present in places other than the South, but I didn't expect racism to be as widespread as it was here in California." 

Autrilla moved to California five years before Rosa Parks ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott and less than a year later moved with her husband, Raymond Parks, to Detroit, where they found racism and discrimination in housing, employment and education. Autrilla Scott like Rosa Parks, was dismayed by racial conditions in her new home. Both women went to work trying to improve those conditions and continued to work toward improvement of U.S. race relations throughout their lives and, even as older women, did not give up the fight. And in death, their fight lives on.

Another thing I loved about Autrilla was that she never thought a person was too old to learn or to start all over again. After retiring from her career as a nurse, she went back to school and learned to write, with emphasis in poetry, essay and short fiction. She entered her work into competitions; had reading events; appeared at book festivals; and challenged younger writers to work as hard at their craft as she did. In 2008, I was at the Leimert Book Festival in Los Angeles. Guess who was also there under the tent with her own book--83-year-old Autrilla Scott, holding court among all those young writers and dishing out welcomed advice to people more than half a century younger than her. I loved that woman!

In her two memoirs, I Remember When: A Town Named Hope, Arkansas, and Stories from the Past, Autrilla reminisces about Bill Clinton's childhood, her own childhood, her life in times past, education, her pursuit of accomplishment in her later years and her civil rights and civic activism. 

I Remember When:
A Town Named
Hope, Arkansas

Stories from the Past

Autrilla never forgot the lessons of her hometown or the life she left behind when she left Hope, Arkansas, and moved West to blaze new trails.

"Growing up in Hope, Arkansas, was an experience that compares to nothing else I have ever done in my life," Autrilla said. "It laid the foundation for who I am today and taught me many valuable lessons about family, live, love, and faith." 

A student of the late poet Manazor Gamboa of Homeland Cultural Center, Autrilla has poetry published in the Homeland Neighborhood Cultural Center Books of Poetry, Silver Pearls; The International Library of Poetry; and The National Library of Poetry; read poetry for Press-Telegram columnist Tom Hennessy's Poetry Fest; and held readings at Long Beach Museum of Art. 

Autrilla Scott & A Place Called Hope

Autrilla Scott Lane 

Autrilla Scott and Rosa Parks provided an example to others and certainly made a difference to the lives of oppressed people in the United States. Autrilla became a community activist and was the first Long Beach African American to have a street named for her honor.  

Autrilla was a civil rights pioneer in Long Beach and an activist who fought Jim Crow laws in the southern United States as well as Southern California, a social and political activist who did not mind taking her battle to the streets, and an artist who wrote to inspire. 

Long Beach, California
Lbc Euro Oval Sticker
(Google Affiliate Ad)

By Putting together this tribute to Autrilla Scott, I hope that others can see her example of how to leave a legacy. Although many people do not possess the courage or the persistence to see a job through and get it done right like Autrilla, maybe you can find some small contribution to make in your life to make a difference in someone else's. Autrilla Scott made a difference in my life. Thank you for letting me share her with you.

Long Beach and I will miss you, Autrilla. It is an honor to have known you.

Sunny Nash

Bigmama Didn't Shop
At Woolworth's

by Sunny Nash

Sunny Nash—leading author on U.S. race relations—writes on U.S. history and contemporary American topics, ranging from Jim Crow laws to social media networking, using her book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, chosen by the Association of American University Presses for understanding of U.S. race relations.

When I wrote my book, Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, there was no FaceBook, which requires precautions against political correctness. because communications one key stroke away from insulting someone.

© 2012 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

www.sunnynash.blogspot.com

~Thank You~

Join Sunny Nash 

Follow Sunny Nash

Join Sunny Nash on Huffington Post

Communications have changed and are light years ahead of the tools I used writing my book and columns on a personal computer. I had no idea how easy it would become to inflict  political incorrectness.

Also join me on Huffington Post for my comments and discussions on civil rights, race relations, politics, style, entertainment and other pressing issues of the day.

Tweet

 

Jim Crow Laws, Ethel Waters and Television

Ethel Waters
First African American Star
on American Television
The Ethel Waters Show
June 14, 1939

Ethel Waters was the first black television star.

Ethel Waters was the star of The Ethel Waters Show, which debuted in 1939 during the height of Jim Crow laws in America, long before Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and the modern civil rights movement.

Ethel Waters entered music, radio, television, movies and stage, became a Hollywood star of race movies. Radio, television and film producers, band leaders, song writers and music industry career executives took notice of Waters as she developed the ability to master a song in music genres of blues and jazz. 

Ethel Waters' life (1896-1977) spanned an entire music, radio, television, film and Jim Crow era.

In 1896, the year of her birth, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v Ferguson to uphold segregation in America, opening the door to discrimination and degradation in all aspects of African American life, including aspects of African American life that had not yet been invented, such as radio, television, movies and music recording. The Plessy decision stayed in force until Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King got it wiped off the books after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Ethel Waters was the first African American star in a sponsored and syndicated coast-to-coast radio show.

Ethel Waters on Radio

In 1933, Ethel Waters was the singer for white band leader, Jimmy Dorsey. 

Remembered as a matronly servant to white families in radio, movies and television, Ethel Waters was a radio star before she put on an apron. Because of her radio and vaudeville circuit experience, Ethel Waters was sought for theater roles, Mamba's Daughters, Cabin in the Sky and Member of the Wedding. Later, she appeared in the film versions of Cabin in the Sky and Member of the Wedding, and appeared in the Hollywood film features, Gift of Gab, Cairo, Tales of Manhattan, Pinky and The Sound and the Fury.

Ethel Waters' 1939 television special contained an excerpt of her 1939 theater production, Mamba's Daughters. Like the book, Mamba's Daughters, the stage play was about a maid, typical for the Jim Crow era. At that time maids, nannies and servants were the reality of an African American woman's life and a reality that black Hollywood accommodated with stereotypical roles in movies. Because early television and movies, like their modern counterparts, relied on sponsors and viewers for financing, filmmakers were careful not to offend audiences, especially in the American Deep South, where segregation was particularly strong. 

Jeanette MacDonald 
& Ethel Waters 
1942 MGM Film, CAIRO

In the era of Jim Crow laws and early film and television, mainstream reaction to African Americans in roles of equality with whites was negative. The television and film industries tread lightly on racial ground, as not to offend the public by placing too much importance on the roles of blacks coming into American homes via television, a statement on popular culture. 

Because filmmakers,  producers, studios, distributors and theaters needed southern audiences for their product, some scenes were cut out of a film if the scene featuring a racially combined cast was judged to be too flattering or too respectful of black characters, especially black female characters, who were exclusive portrayed in movies as maids and nannies during the Jim Crow era. In the film CIARO, Ethel Waters took a non-threatening role behind her film co-star, Jeanette McDonald, a star among the Golden Girls of MGM with Lana Turner, Judy Garland,  Grace Kelly (Late Princess Grace of Monaco)  and Ava Gardener, among other female white stars, starts that made Hollywood History. 

Race during the era of Jim Crow laws, was such a big deal that it extended beyond the screen of the movies. In early Hollywood when miscegenation laws were still on the books and in full effect, Hollywood studies forbade the romantic relationship of black and white actors on and off set. 

Child of the Sixties Forever

Sammy Davis, May Britt

Children & Nanny

White green-eyed actress Ava Gardener, reported to be bisexual, as taboo as interracial romance, nearly lost her MGM contract because she was dating Sammy Davis, Jr. Her studio demanded that the romance end immediately. Davis dated other white actresses, including Kim Novak, and in 1960 married Swedish actress, May Britt when interracial romance and marriage were still taboo nationwide, one of the reasons for Britt's retirement from movies. The couple raised three children together.

This was during the time when every aspect of American society was segregated--schools, employment, housing, marriage, facilities, recreation, entertainment, services and rights. 

When Ethel Waters entered music and went from stage to studio, she was young, beautiful and vibrant, but was reduced to taking the subservient acting jobs Hollywood studios, television, radio and theaters allowed her and other black female actors to play--maids and servants with jobs in white households. 

Black actors, who would take these acting jobs (some like Sammy Davis, Jr., part of the famed Rat Pack withe Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford would not) turned the roles into masterpieces that drew attention of mainstream audiences. However, acting jobs for black females, written to be subservient to roles played by white females, did not portray black women as feminine, sexy or in any way competitive with white lead actresses. 

It is said that Waters took roles she did not respect because she needed the employment, but turned the cardboard stereotypical caricatures into human beings of substance. Stereotypical caricatures were the norm until the mid-1960s after Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had burst onto the civil rights scene.

Custom search Jim Crow laws! 

Georgette Harvey

The 1939  Ethel Waters Show featured film and theater star Georgette Harvey and film star Freidi Washington 

Georgette Harvey was born in 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri. She was a writer, singer and actress, famous for the role of Maria in the original 1935 George Gershwin Broadway production of the opera, Porgy and Bess. 

Freidi Washington, born in 1903 in Savannah, Georgia, is best known for her role in the film, Imitation of Life, playing the half-white daughter of Louise Beavers. With her green eyes and light complexion, Washington was ignored for acting jobs as maids in many movies. Because she was fair-skinned enough to pass for white, film producers feared she would be mistaken for white playing. Because Washington was not white, film producers would not cast her in their movies to play romantic leads opposite white actors such s Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Charles Boyer, Errol Flynn, William Powell or any other actor playing a love interest to a leading actress. In addition, during the era of Jim Crow laws, film producers were advised by movie distributors not to portray black actresses as glamorous.

Florence "Flo Jo" Griffith-Joyner

It took television many decades to go from Jim Crow to the flashy star of the Olympics, Flo Jo, the fastest woman in the world.

The Olympics on television gave the world some of its first positive glimpses of American black women.

At the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, the world saw images of Alice Coachman when she became the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. In 1960, Wilma Rudolph, who had overcome polio, made national headlines on radio, television and newspapers when she became the first U.S. female to win three gold medals in track and field at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

Television cameras loved Florence Flo Jo Joyner's flash and speed at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, where she became the world's fastest and most glamorous woman in track, setting records still unbroken and winning three gold medals. In the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Dominique Dawes became the first African American female gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal, and remained the only one until the 2012 London Olympics, in which Gabby Douglas, became the first African American female gymnast to win the individual all-around gold medal.

Vanessa Williams
First Black Miss America 1984
The Beauty of Miss America

Ethel Waters made her television debut in 1939. Did she know the portal she opened? This included the first black Miss America, Vanessa Williams, in 1984. 

The standards of American beauty changed forever and elevated black women to a new height of glamour when the television audience saw the diamond tiara being placed on the head of a black Miss America for the first time. Little black girls all over America looked as Vanessa Williams' achievement as validation of their own physicality. In addition, the mainstream world had to acknowledge that black woman on television and in films were more than servants to be offhandedly regarded no more than pieces of furniture. Like Ethel Waters, Vanessa Williams recorded popular music and became a film and television star.

Ethel Waters
Recorded by Black Swan 

Being the first, Ethel Waters opened the door for African American women on television, in radio, movies, beauty and music. Waters led the way for other black women to become celebrated and decorated icons of theater, radio, television and movies. 

Ethel Waters starred in the music, stage, television and film, earning awards in the Grammy Hall of Fame, National Recording Registry, Hollywood Walk of Fame, Christian Music Hall of Fame and Gospel Music Hall of Fame. Winner of an Emmy Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, among others, Waters was a pioneer in the music recording industry, releasing phonograph records for Cardinal Records in 1919, Black Swan from 1921 to 1924 with the Jazz Masters and touring with Fletcher Henderson and the Black Swan Troubadours, and in 1925, signing a record deal with Columbia.

Ethel Waters & Jean Crain
1949 Hollywood Film, Pinky

Known as the first black female superstar, Ethel Waters became one of the most popular and highest-paid stars of her day, rising from her humble childhood, daughter of a rape victim, mostly raising herself on the streets of Chester, Pennsylvania, until she married at age 13. She soon left the abusive husband, moved to Philadelphia and became a hotel maid until she was encouraged to sing a song. That song changed everything. At age 17, she began singing and dancing her way through the vaudeville circuits to Broadway to Hollywood and became the second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award for her 1949 performance as Dicey Johnson in the movie, Pinky.

Other stars in Waters' category at the 22nd Academy Awards were film actresses, Ethel Barrymore also for  Pinky; Celeste Holm for Come to the Stable; and Elsa Lanchester also for Come to the Stable. The winner was film, radio and stage star, Mercedes McCambridge for All the King's Men, with Broderick Crawford, winner of Best Actor. McCambridge was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1956 for the film, Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. Her filmography includes the 1973 film, The Exorcist, for which McCambridge dubbed the terrifying voice of the possessed child, played by Linda Blair.

Before Ethel Waters, there was Hattie McDaniel, although they were contemporaries in movies and television.

Hattie McDaniel Receives Oscar
from Fay Bainter, 1940

Hattie McDaniel was the first African American actor to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her 1939 role as the servant, Mammy, in the film, Gone with the Wind, starring Clark Gable, based on the novel, Gone With the Wind By Mitchell, Margaret, Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to sing on radio, singing with Will Rogers, famed actor and comic who made the 1934 film, Judge Priest, with McDaniel and African American actor, Stepin Fetchit. In this movie, McDaniel received her first on-screen acting credit, although she had made appearances in many other films for pay. In 1947, McDaniel created the CBS radio character, Beulah, for the 15-minute daily radio broadcast, The Beulah Show, a spin-off of the Fibber McGee and Molly radio program.

While her radio Beulah was on vacation in the summer of 1952, Hattie McDaniel filmed the first six episodes of the Beulah television production. Shortly thereafter, she suffered a heart attack, stroke and breast cancer. While ill, McDaniel recorded her Beulah radio show. She died on October 26, 1952 at the age of 57. McDaniel's television Beulah episodes would have made her the first black actor on American television instead of Ethel Waters had the shows been broadcast and not shelved by the television studio after her death. Some say the programs were never aired because McDaniel's contract demanded her script approval to prevent the degradation of her character. As a result of her editorial control, the programs were not suitable for racist Southern audiences.

Ethel Waters continued to dazzle television audiences into her later years.

Ethel Waters 
& Tennessee Ernie Ford

In 1952, Ethel Waters was cast in the ABC TV sit-com, Beulah. Waters accepted the role of Beulah, which became the first regularly aired television program starring an African American. However, Beulah stirred such controversy, drawing criticism from the NAACP due to its degrading portrayal of African Americans, Ethel Waters left the show in protest. Louise Beavers took over the role and played the character as the studios demanded. In 1950, Waters took her talent to the Broadway stage, starring with Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding, and went on to the film version in 1952. Staying busy throughout her life, Waters wrote two books, both adapted for the stage. In 1957 and 1959, Waters was a guest on NBC's The Ford Show. This was one year after Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had won the Supreme Court decision in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that started the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in America.

Billy Graham & Ethel Waters

By the 1960s, after decades of being a star, Water's Hollywood career was over. The nation and African Americans had moved into a modern era that would not tolerate any reminders of Jim Crow. With the irreverent militant Black Power Movement pushing the peaceful patience of the Civil Rights Movement aside, Waters became a fading relic of the past. The final 20 years of her life, until her death, Ethel Waters spent touring with evangelist, Billy Graham.

Earlier this year, the Billy Graham Library hosted an exhibit of memorabilia, rare photographs and recordings: Ethel Waters: His Eye is on the Sparrow--also the title of one of Waters' autobiographies and a play adapted for stage. Ethel Waters died on September 2, 1977, in Chatsworth, California. 

Custom search black Hollywood! 

© 2012 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

www.sunnynash.blogspot.com

~Thank You~