#Cora Green

[uispeccoll]

Anything but Silent: Lobby Card for Swing

Last year, Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries acquired items to form a new collection: the Black Film and Television Collection. In honor of Black History Month, we’re shining a spotlight on a different item from this collection.

In last week’s installment, we took a closer look at the poster for 1919’s The Green-Eyed Monster. Now we’re picking up 20 years later, with the spotlight on a lobby card from Oscar Micheaux’s 1938 film Swing, part of the Black Film and Television Collection. Starring Cora Green, Swing is notable as an example of two overlapping genres: race film and musical film.

Like many of Micheaux’s films, Swing it is also a tale centered around Black characters with grand aspirations. And like Micheaux himself, these women are pioneers, willing to make a path through the unknown.

Swing is a story born of the Harlem Renaissance, which by 1938 was declining in the wake of the Great Depression. The movie follows Eloise Jackson (Hazel Diaz) and Mandy Jenkins (Cora Green), two young women from Birmingham, Alabama. Mandy catches her husband (Larry Seymour) having an affair with Eloise, and Eloise flees to start over as a singer in Harlem. Her past catches up with her, however, and through a series of mishaps, it ends up being Mandy who succeeds as a performer on Broadway.

Who was Oscar Micheaux?

Last week’s blog touched on the work of Micheaux, but it’s worth digging deeper into the life of this singular talent.

Micheaux was born in 1884 and grew up with his 12 siblings on a farm in a small town in Illinois. His parents had been born into slavery in Kentucky, but neither emancipation nor a move north could create distance from the realities of structural racism.

The debts Micheaux’s parents had undertaken to keep the farm afloat became more burdensome over time and had educational repercussions for their fifth-eldest child. For a while, they were able to send Oscar to a school in a neighboring town, but financial difficulties eventually forced them to bring him back to work on the farm. This adjustment was difficult for an intelligent, ambitious teen to process, and Micheaux rebelled. Frustrated, Oscar’s father sent him to his older brother in Chicago, where he took work as a porter.

During this stint in the city, Micheaux set his hopes on homesteading to the west. He saved the earnings from his job until he could buy farmland in South Dakota and worked this land for years, a Black man surrounded by a community of white homesteaders. His experience in South Dakota came to an end when a drought withered his crops and his first marriage began to deteriorate. Micheaux committed these experiences to the page, emerging in 1913 with an anonymous, self-published book titled The Conquest, and a new ambition: to make his living as a storyteller.

In 1918, Micheaux would turn much of the material from The Conquest into a new, more fictionalized project, a novel he would call The Homesteader (both books can be found in the UI Libraries Special Collections & Archives). It was this work that caught the eye of the Lincoln Film Company’s George Johnson, who contacted Micheaux and offered to adapt the novel. However, the two couldn’t agree on a direction for the project, and the deal was scrapped. It became clear to Micheaux that if he wanted narrative control over a film based on his story, he’d have to make it himself. And in 1919, the new, Sioux City-based Micheaux Book & Film Company released the silent film The Homesteader.

Swing came almost 20 years after The Homesteader. By the time it was released, Micheaux had made nearly forty movies, both silent films and “talkies.” His contributions had defined the art of the race film and brought the experiences of Black Americans to the screen. As one might expect given the climate of his day, Micheaux was no stranger to controversy and censorship; his stories confronted racism directly, in ways the white establishment found “political” and therefore threatening. As an independent filmmaker in a burgeoning studio system, Micheaux’s budget was often tightly constrained. In 1928, he had to declare bankruptcy, but he continued filmmaking afterward with the same tenacity that had led him to that parcel of land in South Dakota.

Micheaux only made four more films after this one, and by his death in 1951 he had declared bankruptcy again. But in recent years, his contributions to film history have received more attention. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures features an exhibit on Micheaux’s work, and in 2010 the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp in his honor.

Swing and Cora Green

Since Swing was a musical film, it also gave Cora Green a new opportunity to showcase the singing voice that had already made her a star. Green performs two of Swing’s four musical numbers, “Bei Mir Bist di Schön” and “Heaven Help This Heart of Mine.”

Though she was only in two feature films (Swing in 1938 and Moon Over Harlem in 1939), her decades as a vaudeville performer had earned her the distinction of “the highest-paid colored woman in vaudeville,” according to one contemporary newspaper. She was popular enough that during World War II, she toured with the United Service Organizations (USO) to the Persian Gulf, performing for Black troops. Unfortunately, we don’t know what direction Green’s life took after the war, since she vanishes from the record in 1949.

What Green left behind was a limited but unique body of work, and this lobby card is a small piece of her story. In Swing, her voice carries to us through the years, the sound of a new art form just hitting its stride.

Next week, we’ll explore another distinct genre of Black filmmaking: the Blaxploitation film

---Natalee Dawson, Communication Coordinator at UIowa Libraries, with assistance from Liz Riordan, Anne Bassett, and Jerome Kirby

[roseshavethoughts]

Swing (1938)

The RHT Cinema Swing (1938) - Full Movie

Swing (1938) Plot – Ted Gregory is trying to be the first black producer to mount a show on Broadway, but he has trouble with his star singer – Swing. Director – Oscar Micheaux Starring – Cora Green, Larry Seymour, Hazel Diaz Genre – Musical | Drama Released – 1938 IMDB

[whyeverr]

"I told you, Tav. People come together to share a meal. People come out of the woodwork for birthday cake."

And churros. And cupcakes. And even more birthday cake.

[a-state-of-bliss]

CR Fashion Book #3 2013 - Cora Emanuel by Ethan James Green

[dynamitekansai]

WWE NXT (OCTOBER 22, 2024)

[moonstalkerwerewolf]

Cora

A young-she dragon bonded to Muirren Leitner, and one of 7 dragons left living in the Realm. While the size of a kitten as a newborn hatchling, Cora is not a small dragon as an adult, being large enough to carry off small-mid size horses. That said, Cora loves fish and poultry the most.

Artwork and character © @moonstalkerwerewolf. Please DO NOT repost or remove the source and comments!

[ambreignsfan4life]

[bittcrsuite]

@manybruises liked this post for a closed starter. plot in source.

"we have approximately..." cora checked her phone as she walked into the hotel room, tugging her baseball cap off her head. she ran her fingers through her brown locks, dropping the phone and hat on the hotel desk. "two hours before he calls asking where i am." cora had been on set doing 14 hour shoots all month, so this was her first visit on the european leg of man down's tour. she took a few steps toward the other, hand reaching up to run her digits through their hair gently. "so? tell me everything. how have the shows been? are you giving your life in la up to become a proper european?" she put on a bad english accent on near the end of the sentence, a teasing grin splashed across her face.

[aesthetic--mood]

Zelena Mills Aesthetic

[wrestlefestad]

welcome to 𝙒𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙏𝙇𝙀𝙁𝙀𝙎𝙏𝙃𝙌 --- 𝙉𝙊𝙉 𝙆𝘼𝙔𝙁𝘼𝘽𝙀 wrestling tumblr based rpg. we're a newly revamped group looking for some fresh new faces to join our amazing crew ! you're free to be as creative as you want ! we still have many roles open and no company is off limits ! original characters are always welcomed.

[brokenjardaantech]

you are my daughter

summary:

Upon discovering that his SAM is not compatible with anyone other than his closest relatives, Alec Ryder knows he needs backups. He also knows he can't trust his spineless son as the new Pathfinder.

His daughter, on the other hand, is far simpler. Spew something about building a new society in a new galaxy so that biotics like her don't have to suffer, put her on the Pathfinder team, give her the SAM implant - done. Hard and solid proof that she is his daughter, not some random pilot's. Yes, they didn't speak to each other for a decade, but she is his daughter. She will forever be his daughter.

She is his daughter, no one else's. End of. Case closed.

author's notes:

written for september's prompt fill in the mass effect forever discord server: foreboding. some of the tags won't make sense if you don't read the previous entries of the series, but if you don't have the time, just keep in mind that Alec is a very, very unreliable narrator. The tags are not a joke. I repeat: the tags are not a joke. I can write entire essays on how Alec Ryder is a massive arsehole who sees his family as his possessions instead of actual human beings, but for now, please have this.

For people who haven't read the books or have heard of them but don't know anything about them, the SAM implant incompatibility thing comes from Cora's novel.

[whyeverr]

“Heyyy! Happy birthday! Great party!”

After exchanging pleasantries, Tyler furtively checks to see who all is in earshot, before inquiring, “You know it’s no rush, but I was wondering if you’d made it out to the garage, and what you thought of it for your workshop—”

“Oh! Yeah, we’ve been so focused on getting the house cleared out, but it feels like we’re finally rounding the home stretch. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten your little surprise… It’s at the top of my to do list!”

[foxyou-too]

Cora Sheibani

[dynamitekansai]

wwe: Celebrate National Dog Day with these sweet pups and their WWE Superstar humans! ❤️🐶

[droptoeholdyourhorses]

[walks-the-ages]

I gotta remember to look up Raymonde's description tomorrow lol.

Maurice Leblanc is every single Lady blonde with green eyes?????