50 years of blacks in entertainment

In 1970, Charles Gordone became the first Black to win a Pulitzer Prize for his dramatic hit No Place To Be Somebody. More than a decade later, August Wilson joined Gordone when he won Pulitzers for his plays Fences and Piano Lessons.

Audra McDonald is one of only a handful of Broadway actresses to have won multiple Tony Awards. She has won three of the prestigious statuettes for her roles in Carousel, Master Class and Ragtime.

Other major Broadway successes featuring Black performers include Purlie, The Wiz, Dreamgirls, Lena Horne-The Lady and Her Music, `Eubie,' Bubblin' Brown Sugar, Sophisticated Ladies, Bring In 'Da Noise, Bring In 'Da Funk, and Ain't Misbehavin'. Broadway's biggest recent blockbuster, The Lion King, features a cast that is almost completely Black.

Like Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange showed the range of Black female writers with her hit play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Forty-six years have passed since Marian Anderson gently but forcefully opened the doors of the operatic world for Black performers. She, in 1955, became the fist Black to perform with the prestigious Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Other Black performers who've excelled in the opera world include Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett, William Warfield, Simon Estes and Lawrence Winters.

Comedy is an entertainment field that for the last couple of decades has embraced huge numbers of Black performers. In the early days there were Moms Mabley, "Pigmeat" Markham, Nipsey Russell, Slappy White, Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson and Redd Foxx thrilling audiences on albums as well as stage and television. Recent hot comics include Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Chris Tucker, Arsenio Hall, Steve Harvey, Bernie Mac, D.L. Hughley, Jamie Foxx and, of course, the legendary Richard Pryor. Whereas older comics reached fans on albums, their recent counterparts have seen the method of reaching audiences move from vinyl to video. They had such outlets as "Def Comedy Jam."

A variety of elegant dancers and hoofers has had their careers chronicled in the pages of JET over the last half century including the Nicholas Brothers, Katherine Dunham, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Geoffrey Holder, Carmen DeLavallade, Honi Coles, Gregory Hines, the Four Step Brothers and Savion Glover.

And in literature, Black writers have come a long way since the early 1950s when James Baldwin thrilled critics and audiences alike with his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain. He was joined in that decade by such authors as Richard Wright (White Man, Listen) and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man).

Later their ranks were joined by Frank Yerby, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Terry McMillan, Eric Jerome Dickey and E. Lynn Harris impressed both Black and White readers with their earthy tales of relationships.

Yes, the accomplishments and inroads Blacks have made in the arts are nothing short of phenomenal. Poverty, racism and other obstacles never proved to be insurmountable for these performers.