The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has recently acquired a collection of materials on Ethel Waters, a pioneering twentieth-century Black singer and actress.
Born in 1896 as a result of the rape of her teenage Black mother Louise Anderson, Waters was raised in poverty by her grandmother in Philadelphia. Speaking of her difficult upbringing in her autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow (originally published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. in 1951), Waters stated, “I never was a child.”
After leaving an abusive marriage she began in 1910 at the age of 13, Waters was ultimately offered professional work as a singer at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore following a performance in a nightclub on her seventeenth birthday. She then began her groundbreaking career in radio, theater, television, and film.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Waters recorded several notable blues songs, such as “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Stormy Weather.” In 1939, The Ethel Waters Show premiered, making her the first Black performer to star in their own television special. Ten years later, she became the second Black actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in the 1949 film Pinky.
The new Ethel Waters Papers collection at the Ransom Center includes 31 boxes of letters, photographs, recordings, and rare manuscripts. The archive also includes over 180 audio recordings, including unreleased radio performances, live concerts, and studio sessions.
“Ethel Waters’ career on stage and screen stretched from the Jim Crow era into the era of the modern civil rights movement, from an era of legally sanctioned segregation into an era that demanded greater opportunity for African American participation in American life,” said Stephen Enniss, the Betty Brumbalow Director of the Harry Ransom Center. “Her life story is a vitally important American story, which the Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin is honored to preserve and share with new generations of students and researchers seeking to understand this past and our still-evolving struggle to realize the full promise of America for all.”
