A trailblazer on the stage and behind the wheel
On her first day on the job, Gertrude Jeannette, believed to be the first woman to drive a cab in New York City, got in a fender bender — on purpose.
She had pulled up in front of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan looking for a fare, but was cut off by other taxi drivers.
“In those days they didn’t allow Black drivers to work downtown, you had to work uptown,” Jeannette, who was African-American, later recalled. “They said, ‘Say, buddy, you know you’re not supposed to be on this line.’ ”
As cabbies hurled insults and hemmed her in, she remained calmly on line — until, that is, a Checker cab lurched in front of her.
“I rammed my fender under his fender, swung it over to the right and ripped it,” she said in 2011, at a ceremony in her honour at the Dwyer Cultural Center in Harlem. When the other driver got a good look at her, he screamed: “A woman driver! A woman driver!”
She was later reprimanded by an inspector, but she drove off with her very first customer.
Jeannette, who was also one of the first women to get a motorcycle licence in New York, and who later overcame a speech impediment to become a Broadway, film and television actor as well as a playwright, producer and director, died April 4, at her home in Harlem. She was 103.
Her niece, Angela Hadley Brown, confirmed the death.
Jeannette never wanted to act but was pushed into the theatre, she said.
With the money she earned driving, she had set out to correct her childhood stammer by enrolling in the one speech class she could find, at the American Negro Theater, housed in of what is today the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
Acting instruction was part of the curriculum, and she studied alongside Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. She was quickly singled out for her stage presence and cast in her first Broadway production, Lost in the Stars, which premiered at the Music Box Theater in1949.
“She had many opportunities to go to Hollywood ... She stayed in Harlem to make sure the community had top-notch theatre.” WARD NIXON HADLEY PLAYERS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
She would go on to land rolls in Broadway productions such as The Long Dream (1960), Nobody Loves an Albatross (1963), The Amen Corner (1965), The Skin of Our Teeth (1975) and Vieux Carré (1977), written by Tennessee Williams, with whom she became friends. Her film credits include Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Shaft (1971) and Black Girl (1972).
Gertrude Hadley was born on Nov. 28, 1914, in Urbana, Ark., about 24 kilometres from the Louisiana border. Her father, Willis Lawrence Hadley, taught at a mission on a Native American reservation near Spiro, Okla. Her mother, Salley Gertrude Crawford Hadley, was a homemaker.
Gertrude grew up on a farm with five brothers and one sister. During the Depression, she moved with her family to Little Rock, Ark., and enrolled at Dunbar High School, a segregated one-room schoolhouse.
On her prom night, she met her future husband, Joe Jeannette, a heavyweight prizefighter 35 years her senior. The pair danced the Lindy Hop, a popular dance in Harlem, and by the end of the song he had asked her to marry him.
Her husband worked as a bodyguard of sorts for Paul Robeson, the baritone singer, actor and political activist. In 1949, the Harlem Dusters, including Gertrude, travelled to what was to be an open-air concert in Peekskill, N.Y.
“That’s the first time I saw the Ku Klux Klan,” Gertrude Jeannette recalled in 2015. “They came out to lynch Paul Robeson.”
When the American Negro Theater closed in 1949, many of the company’s Black actors moved to California or elsewhere. Some, including Jeannette, were barred from working during the Red scare of the 1950s; she was singled out, she said, because of her association with Robeson.
So Jeannette — “Mother Gertrude” or “Ms. J,” as she was known in Harlem — set up a succession of theatre companies in the neighbourhood, including the HADLEY players (for Harlem Artist’s Development League Especially for You) in 1979.
“She had many opportunities to go to Hollywood, but she always stayed in Harlem,” said Ward Nixon, who was the artistic director for the HADLEY players. “She stayed in Harlem to make sure the community had top-notch theatre.”