Griffin Sisters
They publicly spoke out by demanding higher wages and better working conditions for Black performers at a time when discrimination and racism were both common in the entertainment industry.
[1] Emma and Mabel began singing in church, and studied music at Louisville's Black college, the Kentucky State Normal School.
The family moved to Chicago in 1894, and the two young women got work performing at the recently opened Kohl and Middleton's Dime Museum.
[1] Dime Museums, popularized by PT Barnum, combined 'human oddities' like conjoined twins or armless people with entertainment and beauty pageants of attractive women.
Emma was described as darker skinned, shorter and 'more voluptuous'; Mabel was tall and svelte with 'hair slightly kinked and dyed a beautiful antique gold hue".
Typical of dime museum shows and vaudeville of that time, the sisters satisfied the desires of white audiences for 'the exotic other'.
[1] In 1895, Emma and Mabel were hired as chorus girls with John Isham's The Octaroons, a travelling vaudeville show of 50 Black and mixed-race performers.
[1] In the early 1900s, the sisters began working for the Western Vaudeville Managers Association,(WVMA) one of three major booking agencies.
Considered 'real vaudeville' these agencies provided more security and steady work for entertainers but took a substantial cut of performer's salaries.
[1] Emma and Mabel, billed as "Character change artists" and "entrancing vocalists",[3] performed all over the United States, including Alaska, earning from $50 to $100 per week.
[5] The following year in the same city, they were attacked and physically ejected from a bar by the saloonkeeper because of their color; the San Francisco Call and Post covered the difficulties they had getting their case heard by a judge.
[3] In 1910, they moved back to Chicago as a home base and began performing primarily for Black audiences, writing their own material.
[12] Emma's obituary made the front page of The New York Age, where she was praised for her talent and her ability to make people laugh onstage, as well as for her activism in politics as a suffragette and her campaigns for better conditions for Black performers.
Their activism opened the gates for later celebrities like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, who continued to push for better conditions for Black performers.
