I, Too, Sing America  - Langston Hughes, 1945

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.

mantan moreland --"Comedy pioneer..."


Mantan Moreland appeared in over three hundred films throughout his career. Some of his other films include It Started with Eve (1941), A Haunting We will Go with Laurel and Hardy (1942), Cabin in the Sky (1943), and See Here, Private Hargrove (1944).
Mantan Moreland worked Harlem's Apollo Theatre in the 1940's and 1950's with Redd Foxx. He was the featured comedian in the black-cast show "Rhapsody in Rhythm" in 1945. In 1957 he appeared on stage in New York in a black production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" as Estragon (Gogo). Reviewing the production for the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson praised the veteran comic's performance for bringing to the role "a suspicious joyousness of manner, a crack-voiced laugh, a teetry walk, a general feeling that he is the one who is going to be slapped."

In 1959, he told a Cleveland newspaper that he would "never play another stereotype, regardless of what Hollywood offers." He added, "The Negro, as a race, has come too far in the last few years for me to dash his hopes, dreams, and accomplishments against a celluloid wall, by making pictures that show him to be a slow-thinking, stupid dolt...Millions of people may have thought that my acting was comical, but I know now that it wasn't always so funny to my own people."

we've come a long way ...

a few sneakers from the collection