A00084 - Daniel Hale Williams, 19th Surgeon Who Performed Heart Surgery

Daniel Hale Williams,  (b. January 18, 1858, Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania — d. August 4, 1931, Idlewild, Michigan), American physician and founder of Provident Hospital in Chicago, credited with the first successful heart surgery.

Williams graduated from Chicago Medical College in 1883. He served as surgeon for the South Side Dispensary (1884–92) and physician for the Protestant Orphan Asylum (1884–93). In response to the lack of opportunity for African Americans in the medical professions, he founded (in 1891) the nation’s first interracial hospital, Provident, to provide training for black interns and the first school for black nurses in the United States. He was a surgeon at Provident (1892–93, 1898–1912) and surgeon in chief of Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington, D.C. (1894–98), where he established another school for African American nurses.

It was at Provident Hospital that Williams performed daring heart surgery on July 10, 1893. Although contemporary medical opinion disapproved of surgical treatment of heart wounds, Williams opened the patient’s thoracic cavity without aid of blood transfusions or modern anesthetics and antibiotics. During the surgery he examined the heart, sutured a wound of the pericardium (the sac surrounding the heart), and closed the chest. The patient lived at least 20 years following the surgery. Williams’ procedure is cited as the first recorded repair of the pericardium; some sources, however, cite a similar operation performed by H.C. Dalton of St. Louis in 1891.

Williams later served on the staffs of Cook County Hospital (1903–09) and St. Luke’s Hospital (1912–31), both in Chicago. From 1899 he was professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and was a member of the Illinois State Board of Health (1889–91). He published several articles on surgery in medical journals. Williams became the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.

A00083 - Edwin Harleston, Artist and Civil Rights Leader

Edwin A. Harleston (b. 1882, Charleston, South Carolina - d. 1931)  was one of the most distinguished artists and civil rights leaders of his generation.  Born in 1882, in Charleston, South Carolina, he graduated from Avery Institute in 1900 and Atlanta University in 1904.  He studied at Howard University with the intention of becoming a physician, but instead set his sights on art.  From 1906 to 1912, he attended the School Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In 1913, Harleston returned to Charleston to help with the family funeral business.  He soon became an active artist, businessman, and civil rights leader.  Harleston founded the Charleston NAACP in 1916 and was successful in its efforts toward educational reform for Black schools, teachers and principals.  He was a firm believer in civil rights for all Americans.  By the 1920's Harleston's reputation as an artist had flourished.  An active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, he received portrait commissions from all over the United States.  Even though his primary mode of art was portraiture, his work also showed the people and culture of the era.

In 1931, Harleston joined the Harmon Foundation at International House in New York.  The House had presented the first all African American exhibition in the United States.  Harleston created sensitive humanistic portraits of mostly African American civic leaders, businessmen, and their families.  He always captured the strength and depth of his subjects' personalities.  The Gibbes Museum and Art Gallery and the Avery Institute in his native Charleston co-hosted an exhibition of his work, Edwin Harleston: Painter of An Era, on the 101st anniversary of his birth.

Among the portraits displayed was his painting of Aaron Douglas, one of the most significant African-American artists of the 20th century.  This portrait was purchased by the Gibbes Museum. Many of Harleston's famous works, including "Mending Sock" and "The Old Servant" are in anthologies of African American Art.  Edwin Harleston died in 1931 at the age of 49.

A00082 - Buddy Bolden, Founding Father of Jazz

Buddy Bolden, byname of Charles Joseph Bolden (b. September 6, 1877, New Orleans, Louisiana - d. November 4, 1931, Jackson, Louisiana), was a cornetist and is a founding father of jazz. Many jazz musician, including Jelly Roll Morton and the great trumpeter Louis Armstrong acclaimed him as one of the most powerful musicians ever to play jazz.

Little is known about the details of Bolden's career, but it is documented that by about 1895 he was leading a band.  The acknowledged king of New Orleans lower musical life, Bolden often worked with six or seven different bands simultaneously.  In 1906, Bolden's emotional stability began to crumble, and the following year he was committed to the East Louisiana State Hospital, from which he never emerged. 

A00081 - Shirley Verrett, Opera Singer

Shirley Verrett, (b. May 31, 1931, New Orleans, Louisiana - d. November 5, 2010, Ann Arbor, Michigan), an opera singer who was a mezzo-soprano who had a regal onstage presence and a colorful vocal range, she was best known in the United States and Europe for her roles as Georges Bizet's fiery Carmen, as both Dido and Cassandra in Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens, and as Azucena in Giuseppe Verdi's Il trovatore.  

Verrett studied  (1955) singing in Los Angeles before continuing her education at the Juilliard School, New York City.  She made her operatic debut in Ohio in 1957 in Benjamin Brittens The Rape of Lucretia.  Two years later she made her European debut in Cologne, Germany, where she portrayed the gypsy in Nicolas Nabokov's Rasputin's End.  Her first appearance at La Scala, in Milan, came in 1966, and she continued to perform there until 1984.  Italians dubbed her "La Nera Callas" ("The Black Callas").  By the late 1980s, however, her vocal quality was becoming inconsistent.  From 1996 to 2010, Verrett taught at the University of Michigan School of Music.  Her autobiography, I Never Walked Alone (written with Christopher Brooks), was published in 2003.

A00080 - Philippa Schuyler, Child Piano Prodigy

Philippa Duke Schuyler (b. August 2, 1931, New York City, New York – d. May 9, 1967, Vietnam) was a noted American child prodigy and pianist who became famous in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of her talent, mixed-race parentage, and the eccentric methods employed by her mother to bring her up.

Schuyler was the daughter of George S. Schuyler, a prominent African American essayist and journalist Josephine Cogdell, a European American Texan and one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty, from a former slave-owning.  Her parents believed that inter-racial marriage could "invigorate" both races and produce extraordinary offspring. They also advocated that mixed-race marriage could help to solve many of the United States' social problems.

Cogdell further believed that genius could best be developed by a diet consisting exclusively of raw foods. As a result, Philippa grew up in her New York City apartment eating a diet predominantly comprised of raw carrots, peas and yams and raw steak. She was given a daily ration of cod liver oil and lemon slices in place of sweets. "When we travel," Cogdell said, "Philippa and I amaze waiters. You have to argue with most waiters before they will bring you raw meat. I guess it is rather unusual to see a little girl eating a raw steak."

Recognized as a prodigy at an early age, Schuyler was reportedly able to read and write at the age of two and a half, and composed music from the age of five. At nine, she became the subject of "Evening With A Gifted Child", a profile written by Joseph Mitchell, correspondent for The New Yorker, who heard several of her early compositions and noted that she addressed both her parents by their first names.

Schuyler began giving piano recitals and radio broadcasts while still a child and attracted significant press coverage. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was one of her admirers and visited her at her home on more than one occasion. By the time she reached adolescence, Schuyler was touring constantly, both in the US and overseas.

Her talent as a pianist was widely acknowledged, although many critics believed that her forte lay in playing vigorous pieces and criticized her style when tackling more nuanced works. Acclaim for her performances led to her becoming a role model for many children in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, but Schuyler's own childhood was blighted when, during her teenage years, her parents showed her the scrapbooks they had compiled recording her life and career. The books contained numerous newspaper clippings in which both George and Josephine Schuyler commented on their beliefs and ambitions for their daughter. Realization that she had been conceived and raised, in a sense, as an experiment, robbed the pianist of many of the illusions of her youth.

In later life, Schuyler grew disillusioned with the racial and gender prejudice she encountered, particularly when performing in the United States, and much of her musical career was spent playing overseas. In her thirties, she abandoned the piano to follow her father into journalism.

Schuyler's personal life was frequently unhappy. She rejected many of her parents' values, increasingly becoming a vocal feminist, and made many attempts to pass herself off as a woman of Iberian (Spanish) descent named Felipa Monterro. Although she engaged in a number of affairs, and on one occasion endured a dangerous late-term abortion after a relationship with a Ghanaian diplomat, she never married.

Philippa Schuyler and her father, George Schuyler, were members of the John Birch Society.

In 1967, Schuyler traveled to Vietnam as a war correspondent. During a helicopter mission near Da Nang to evacuate a number of Vietnamese orphans, the helicopter crashed into the sea. While she initially survived the crash, her inability to swim caused her to drown. A court of inquiry found that the pilot had deliberately cut his motor and descended in an uncontrolled glide – possibly in an attempt to give his civilian passengers an insight into the dangers of flying in a combat zone – eventually losing control of the aircraft.

Her mother was profoundly affected by her daughter's death and committed suicide on its second anniversary.

A00079 - Della Reese, "Touched by an Angel" Star

Della Reese (born Delloreese Patricia Early) (b. July 6, 1931, Detroit, Michigan), an American singer, actress, game show panelist of the 1970s, one-time talk-show hostess and ordained minister. She started her career in the 1950s as a gospel, pop and jazz singer, scoring a hit with her 1959 single "Don't You Know?". In the late 1960s, she had hosted her own talk show, Della, which ran for 197 episodes. Through four decades of acting, she is best known for playing Tess, the lead role on the 1994–2003 television show Touched by an Angel. In later years, she became an ordained  New Thought minister in the Understanding Principles for Better Living Church in Los Angeles, California.

A00078 - Carmen de Lavallade, Actress, Dancer and Choreographer

^{Carmen de Lavallade (born March 6, 1931) is an American actress, dancer and choreographer.}

Carmen de Lavallade was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 6, 1931, to Creole parents from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was raised by her aunt, Adele, who owned one of the first African American history bookshops on Central Avenue. De Lavallade's cousin, Janet Collins, was the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. 

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. 

De Lavallade became a member of the Lester Horton Dance Theater in 1949 where she danced as a lead dancer until her departure for New York City with Alvin Ailey in 1954. Like all of Horton's students, de Lavallade studied other art forms, including painting, acting, music, set design and costuming, as well as ballet and other forms of modern and ethnic dance. She studied dancing with ballerina Carmelita Maracci and acting with Stella Adler.  In 1954, de Lavallade made her Broadway debut partnered with Alvin Ailey in Truman Capote's musical House of Flowers (starring Pearl Bailey).

In 1955, de Lavallade married dancer/actor Geoffrey Holder, whom she had met while working on House of Flowers.  It was with Holder that de Lavallade choreographed her signature solo Come Sunday, to a black spiritual sung by Odetta.  The following year, de Lavallade danced as the prima ballerina in Samson and Delilah, and Aida at the Metropolitan Opera. 

She made her television debut in John Butler's ballet Flight, and in 1957, she appeared in the television production of Duke Ellington's A Drum Is a Woman.  She appeared in several off-Broadway productions including Othello and Death of a Salesman.  An introduction to 20th Century Fox executives by Lena Horne led to more acting roles between 1952 and 1955.  She appeared in several films including Carmen Jones (1954) with Dorothy Dandridge and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) with Harry Belafonte.
De Lavallade was a principal guest performer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company on the company's tour of Asia and in some countries the company was billed as de Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company.  Other performances included dancing with Donald McKayle and appearing in Agnes de Mille's American Ballet Theatre productions of The Four Marys and The Frail Quarry in 1965.  She joined the Yale School of Drama as a choreographer and performer-in-residence in 1970.  She staged musicals, plays and operas, and eventually became a professor and member of the Yale Repertory Theater.  Between 1990 and 1993, de Lavallade returned to the Metropolitan Opera as choreographer for Porgy and Bess and Die Meistersinger.

In 2003, de Lavallade appeared in the rotating cast of the off-Broadway staged reading of Wit & Wisdom.  In 2010, she appeared in a one-night-only concert semi-staged reading of Evening Primrose by Stephen Sondheim.  Truman Capote's musical House of Flowers (starring Pearl Bailey). 

De Lavallade had resided in New York City with her husband Geoffrey Holder until his death on October 5, 2014. Their lives were the subject of the 2005 Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob documentary Carmen and Geoffrey. The couple had one son, Léo. De Lavallade's brother-in-law was Boscoe Holder.  

In 2004 de Lavallade received the Black History Month Lifetime Achievement Award and the Rosie Award (named for Rosetta LeNoire and "given to individuals who demonstrate extraordinary accomplishment and dedication in the theatrical arts and to corporations that work to promote opportunity and diversity"), the Bessie Award in 2006, and the Capezio Dance Award in 2007,as well as an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Julliard School in 2008.