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On Jan. 31, 1934, singer Etta Moten Barnett performed at the White House, the first Black woman to do so in the 20th century.
Etta Moten was born in Weimar, Texas, in 1901 and began signing there as a young girl in her church choir. After graduating high school, she married, moved to Oklahoma, and started a family. She divorced her first husband and relocated to study voice and drama at Western University and the University of Kansas.
After her senior recital, Moten moved to New York to work in musical theater, and then to Los Angeles in 1933 to pursue a career in film – and she found it, making her debut in Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Diggers of 1933” and in that same year performing her most famous film role as a Brazilian singer alongside Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in “Flying Down to Rio.”
Her standout song performance, “La Carioca,” found her costumed with fruit piled high atop her head, years before Carmen Miranda would popularize the look for American audiences. In January 1934, this success in film led Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to invite Etta Moten Barnett to perform at the White House.
After Hollywood, Barnett returned to New York to work on Broadway. Among her notable roles there was a turn as Bess in George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” from 1942 to 1945. Some accounts even suggest that Gershwin wrote the role of Bess with Barnett in mind – he was composing it in 1934 just as her most high-profile film performances were in circulation.
In that same year, Moten had married journalist Claude Barnett, and together Claude and Etta became increasingly involved in civic matters and civil rights. In the ’50s and ’60s, the pair traveled as representatives of the U.S. to the newly independent nations of Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia. This mirrored their civil rights work back home.
Friend and fellow artist-activist Harry Belafonte once said of Etta Moten Barnett that “She gave Black people an opportunity to look at themselves on a big screen as something beautiful when all that was there before spoke to our degradation … She is a true shining star.”
Sources:
Candace Goodwin in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
