Pioneer actress-singer Etta Moten Barnett celebrates 100th birthday in Chicago

Jet, Dec 3, 2001

Famed actress-singer Etta Moten Barnett recently celebrated her 100th birthday in Chicago with some 400 friends and fans.

Entertainer Harry Belafonte led guests in singing "Happy Birthday" before Barnett blew out the single, oversized candle on her 3-foot-high birthday cheesecake during the festivities at the Hyatt Regency Chicago Hotel.

Barnett appeared in Gold Diggers of 1933 and in Flying Down to Rio with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. She starred in the classic Porgy and Bess on Broadway in the 1930s and sang with Duke Ellington. Her clear singing voice caught the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who invited her to sing at his White House birthday party.

She was also the host of her own radio show, "I Remember When," and was active in the National Council of Negro Women, Chicago's DuSable Museum and other civic causes.

Belafonte recalled, "She gave Black people an opportunity to look at themselves on a big screen as something beautiful when all that was there before spoke to our degradation. In her we found another dimension to being Black in our time. She is a true shining star."