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April 21, 2017

22 Glamorous Photos of Women Who Have Inspired African-Americans

They are not only beautiful, but also very talented. These women have more or less inspired African- Americans.

1. Adele Addison.


Adele Addison (born 1925 in Springfield, Massachusetts) is an African-American lyric soprano who was an acclaimed figure in the classical music world during the 1950s and 1960s. Although she did appear in several operas, Addison spent most of her career performing in recital and concert. Her performances spanned a wide array of literature from the Baroque period to contemporary compositions. Known for her polished and fluent tone, Addison made a desirable baroque vocal artist. Many of her recordings were made with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Leonard Bernstein.


2. Billie Holiday.


Eleanora Fagan (1915 – 1959), professionally known as Billie Holiday, was an American jazz musician and singer-songwriter with a career spanning nearly thirty years. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills, which made up for her limited range and lack of formal music education. There were other jazz singers with equal talent, but Holiday had a voice that captured the attention of her audience.


3. Carmen de Lavallade.


Carmen de Lavallade (born 1931) is an American actress, dancer and choreographer. De Lavallade began studying ballet with Melissa Blake at the age of 16. After graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles was awarded a scholarship to study dance with Lester Horton.


4. Carol Brice.


Carol Brice (1918 - 1985) was an American contralto. Born in Sedalia, North Carolina, she studied at Palmer Memorial Institute and later at Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, where she received a Bachelor of Music in 1939. She continued her studies at the Juilliard School of Music from 1939 to 1943. Brice made her recital debut in 1943, that year becoming the first African-American to win the Walter Naumburg Award. Her concerts often featured the piano accompaniment of her brother, Jonathan Brice.


5. Diahann Carroll.


Diahann Carroll (born Carol Diahann Johnson, 1935) is an American television and stage actress and singer known for her performances in some of the earliest major studio films to feature black casts. She is the recipient of numerous stage and screen nominations and awards, including the Golden Globe Award for "Best Actress In A Television Series" in 1968.

6. Diana Sands.


Diana Sands (1934 – 1974) was an American actress, most famous for her portrayal of Beneatha Younger, the sister of Sidney Poitier's character in the original stage and film versions of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1961). She also appeared in a number of dramatic television series in the 1960s and 1970s such as I Spy, as Davala Unawa in the 1967 The Fugitive episode "Dossier on a Diplomat", Dr. Harrison in the Outer Limits episode "The Mice", and Julia. Sands also starred in the 1963 film An Affair of the Skin as the narrator and photographer, Janice.


7. Dorothy Dandridge.


Dorothy Jean Dandridge (1922 – 1965) was an American film and theatre actress, singer, and dancer. She is perhaps best known for being the first African-American actress to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1954 film Carmen Jones. Dandridge performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. In 1959 she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Porgy and Bess. She is the subject of the 1999 HBO biographical film, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. She has been recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Dandridge died under mysterious circumstances at age 42.


8. Ella Fitzgerald.


Ella Jane Fitzgerald (1917 – 1996) was an American jazz singer often referred to as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz and Lady Ella. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.


9. Ethel Waters.


Ethel Waters (1896 – 1977) was an American singer and actress. She frequently performed jazz, big band, and pop music, on the Broadway stage and in concerts, but she began her career in the 1920s singing blues.

Her notable recordings include "Dinah", "Stormy Weather", "Taking a Chance on Love", "Heat Wave", "Supper Time", "Am I Blue?", "Cabin in the Sky", "I'm Coming Virginia", and her version of the spiritual "His Eye Is on the Sparrow". Waters was the second African American, after Hattie McDaniel, to be nominated for an Academy Award. She was also the first African-American woman to be nominated for an Emmy Award, in 1962.


10. Joyce Bryant.


Joyce Bryant (born October 14, 1928) is an African-American singer and actress who achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a theater and nightclub performer. With her signature silver hair and tight mermaid dresses, she became an early African-American sex symbol, garnering such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always Remember".


11. Katherine Dunham.


Katherine Mary Dunham (1909 – 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."


12. Leontyne Price.


Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.


13. Lil Green.


Lillian "Lil" Green (1919 – 1954) was an American blues singer and songwriter. She was among the leading female rhythm and blues singers of the 1940s, possessed with an ability to bring power to ordinary material and compose superior songs of her own.


14. Mahalia Jackson.


Mahalia Jackson (1911 – 1972) was an American gospel singer. Possessing a powerful contralto voice, she was referred to as "The Queen of Gospel". She became one of the most influential gospel singers in the world and was heralded internationally as a singer and civil rights activist. She was described by entertainer Harry Belafonte as "the single most powerful black woman in the United States".


15. Margaret Tynes.


Margaret Tynes was born 1929 in Virginia, USA. Graduated North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina and a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, she enjoyed a successful career in opera for over five decades.


16. Marion Andersen.


Marian Anderson (1897 – 1993) was an American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. Most of her singing career was spent performing in concert and recital in major music venues and with famous orchestras throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965. She preferred to perform in concert and recital only. She did, however, perform opera arias within her concerts and recitals. She made many recordings that reflected her broad performance repertoire of everything from concert literature to lieder to opera to traditional American songs and spirituals.

Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century.


17. Muriel Rahn.


Muriel Rahn (1911 – 1961) was an American vocalist and actress. She co-founded the Rose McClendon Players with her husband, Dick Campbell and was one of the leading black concert singers of the mid-20th Century. She is perhaps best known for her starring role in the original Broadway production of Carmen Jones.


18. Pearl Bailey.


Pearl Mae Bailey (1918 – 1990) was an American actress and singer. After appearing in vaudeville she made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman in 1946. She won a Tony Award for the title role in the all-black production of Hello, Dolly! in 1968. In 1986, she won a Daytime Emmy award for her performance as a fairy godmother in the ABC Afterschool Special, Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale.

Her rendition of "Takes Two to Tango" hit the top ten in 1952. She received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1976 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom on October 17, 1988.


19. Pearl Primus.


Pearl Eileen Primus (1919 – 1994) was a dancer, choreographer and anthropologist. Primus played an important role in the presentation of African dance to American audiences. Early in her career she saw the need to promote African dance as an art form worthy of study and performance. Primus' work was a reaction to myths of savagery and the lack of knowledge about African people. It was an effort to guide the Western world to view African dance as an important and dignified statement about another way of life.


20. Ruby Dee.


Ruby Dee (1922 – 2014) was an American actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and civil rights activist. She is best known for originating the role of "Ruth Younger" in the stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun (1961).

For her performance as Mahalee Lucas in American Gangster (2007), she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Female Actor in a Supporting Role.

She was a Grammy, Emmy, Obie and Drama Desk winner. She was also a National Medal of Arts, Kennedy Center Honors and Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award recipient.


21. Thelma Carpenter.


Thelma Carpenter (1922 – 1997) was a jazz singer and actress, best known as "Miss One", the Good Witch of the North in the movie The Wiz.


22. Zora Neale Hurston.


Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) was an African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.




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