“To Help Enlighten Our People”: ‘Theater Folk’ and Stage Advice Columns in the 1920s Chicago Defender

“Attention audience! Especially those of you that are commonly called stage struck,” noted the advice column on the Chicago Defender’s Stage Page of November 7, 1925. African American former chorus girl Vivienne Russell, who used the byline “Vivienne,” declared that she had “received a number of letters from girls and boys desirous of going upon the stage. I have answered them personally, however but not in detail. Hence this article ‘Stage Struck.’”¹ Vivienne argued that overall “show business is a good business” for those with “plenty of grit,” but that only the “folks that are endowed with talent” should consider the entertainment industry. After measuring one’s vocal or dance ability against other “Race shows or acts,” Vivienne maintained, select amateur entertainers should “fight for their place” on the stage amid a racially segregated entertainment system.² “Stage Struck” was one of the dozens of such pieces Vivienne addressed to young Black Defender readers who sought practical advice on how to successfully enter the vibrant and challenging world of the 1920s professional Black stage.

Between October 1925 and May 1926, vaudevillian Vivienne Gordon Russell wrote the theatrical advice column, “Theater Folks and Theatergoers,” in the Chicago Defender, aimed at both entertainment professionals and audience members. When vivid reports of tragedy and turmoil, including chronicles of increased racial violence, new segregation policies, escalating poverty, or criminal exploits, flooded 1920s Black newspaper headlines, entertainment and leisure news could offer readers momentary escape and solace.³ Black newspapers including the Baltimore Afro-American, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam News, and Chicago Defender, often dedicated at least two pages (out of twenty) to national and local Black entertainment occurrences, from discussions of how blues singer Sarah Martin was a “hit in Baltimore” to laments of the separation of the “Crosby and Jackson” comedy team in San Diego.⁴

Figures 1 and 2.

Vivienne, “Theater Folks and Theatergoers: Chorus Girls Over the Top,” Chicago Defender, 25 October 1925

The importance of the Black press and the Chicago Defender specifically in transmitting the narratives of African American lives has been explored in historical, American Studies, and musicology texts over the past two decades.⁵ Likewise, the lives of Black female journalists in the twentieth century have also been chronicled by historians and media studies scholars.⁶ Yet Vivienne’s columns reveal a moment in the Defender’s 1920s history where a Black woman entertainer also commanded a space as a Black theater industry journalist. This social history article details Vivienne’s professional background and illuminates the broader historical context of the Defender’s “Theater Folks” column. It utilizes Vivienne’s industry experiences to explain her columns’ messages on the mechanics of Black show business, the challenges of respectability politics, her disdain for blackface minstrelsy, and the value of Black entertainment in early-twentieth-century America.⁷ In the absence of biographies, memoirs, or personal correspondence, Vivienne’s professional life was gleaned from census information, city directories, playbills, advertisements, oral histories of Black theater professionals, and, most importantly, the “Theater Folks” articles themselves.

As a Black woman theatrical journalist, amid many male theater columnists published in the Defender, Vivienne publicly championed Black entertainment as a method of “racial uplift”—the attempt to challenge racial hostility and negative images of African Americans through Black political, educational, and socio-cultural success.⁸ Black entertainers in the 1920s contended with the same heightened racial tensions and negative depictions of blackness that plagued African Americans more generally, and they often faced critique and ridicule from Black and white conservative communities who viewed the entertainment profession as one that was not suitable for proper ladies and gentlemen. Revealing that many in the Black entertainment world were quite self-conscious about the images of morality they exhibited on stage and off, Vivienne took it as her charge “to help enlighten” her people by redefining notions of stage respectability and demonstrating how the theatrical profession was a worthy and “honest occupation” for African Americans.⁹ In a decade plagued...