Editor’s Corner: The Whitman Family

In tribute of Black History Month I thought my Blytheville readers may find this story I wrote a few years ago interesting. I stumbled upon information about this family and have always found it fascinating.

Enjoy...

A piece of what is now being called “forgotten history” has a very important link to the city of Osceola and Mississippi County.

From 1899 to 1940, there were four African-American sisters who traveled the country performing on stages from Chicago to New York.

Alberta, Mable, Essie, and Alice Whitman owned their own show and historian Bernard Peterson has declared them the highest paid act in black Vaudeville.

They were the daughters of the Rev. Albery Allson Whitman, who gave his young daughters dancing and singing lessons so they might accompany him on his preaching tours.

Their show included Jubilee song, coon shouts, cakewalks, breakdowns, comedians, midgets, cross-dressers, dancing girls, pickaninnies, and a jazz band. They regularly played in churches, as well as theaters.

Many talents passed through their programs including Bill Robinson, Ethel Water, Princess Wee Wee, Willie Bryant, and Butterbeans and Susie.

Sometimes they had 30 performers plus the jazz band. During the 30s, they created at least nine different shows and often played in New York City.

In 2000, Nadine George-Graves published a book on the Whitman sisters titled The Royalty Of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters And The Negotiation Of Race, Gender And Class In African American Theater 1900-1940.

Graves show these four black women manipulated their race, gender, and class to resist hegemonic forces while achieving success. By maintaining a high-class image, they were able to challenge fictions of racial and gender identity.

So where’s the Osceola connection?

The third daughter, Essie, was born in Osceola, July 4, 1882.

She won a talent contest in a Kansas City, Mo. theater in 1892. At age 10, her voice was clearly audible in the most remote regions of the theater as she sang, "God Won't Love You If You Don't Be Good.”

When she joined her sisters on stage, Essie brought the laughs.

Mabel ran the company and directed the show; Essie was the big-voiced comic-singer (lowest contralto on record); and Alberta was a flash dancer who worked in male drag.  Alice, much younger than her sisters, was regarded by many as the greatest woman tap dancer of her day.

Essie married three times, Prince Ismael, Johnnie Woods, and Carter Hayes.

She retired from the act about 1926 and became a lay preacher at the Metropolitan Church.

In addition, she worked on design and costumes for the shows during the 1920s and appeared with the sisters in a review at New York's Lafayette Theater in 1930.

She was an active evangelist until her death, caused by smoke inhalation in a home fire on May 7, 1963 at Chicago's Provident Hospital. She was buried in Atlanta.

How did it come about that this one sister was born in Osceola?

Well, her father traveled the country preaching. And, in 1882, he was preaching at the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Osceola.

This brings me to another important link.

Albery Allson Whitman was not just another preacher. He is now recognized as a major poet of the 19th century. The “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” published seven volumes of poetry.

Whitman was born May 30, 1851 to slave parents in Hart County, Ky.

He was orphaned after the deaths of his mother in 1862 and his father in 1863. As their slave child he was early set to work in the fields.

In the years after emancipation and the end of the Civil War, Whitman took to the road. After living in Louisville and Cincinnati, he went to Troy, Ohio, where he worked first in a shop where plows were made and then as a laborer in a railroad-construction gang.

He also went to school for a total of seven months. Armed with this exposure to learning, he taught in Carysville, Ohio, and then in Kentucky, near his first home. No later than 1870, he resumed his formal education at Wilberforce University, although apparently for a period of only six months.

It was at this time that he met Daniel Alexander Payne, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church. He had a great influence on Whitman who decided to follow his call to preach.

Whitman went on to preach and founded A.M.E. churches in Ohio, Kansas, Texas, George, and Arkansas.

A romantic poet, Whitman produced seven volumes of poetry. His profound belief in freedom and equality for his race is expressed forcefully in two long narrative poems, "Not a Man and Yet a Man" and "The Rape of Florida." In these poems, he used introductory passages, dedications, plots, and digressions from his stories to convey sentiments echoed by other blacks in pulpits, classrooms, and convention halls — the creeds of self-help, self-trust, determination, and defiance of all that denies a person's humanity.

He died in 1901 and was buried in Atlanta, Ga.

And, so there lies the connection...

For a short time, in the early 1880s, Osceola was the home of a father and daughter who would go on to leave their mark on American history.

Sandra Brand is the editor of the NEA Town Courier and The Osceola Times. She may be reached by phone at 870-763-4461 or 870-563-2615 or by email at brand@osceolatimes.com.