Two book reviews written by Hamilton College Professor of History Maurice Isserman were featured in The Chicago Tribune (Aug. 29, 2004). Isserman reviewed Mona Z. Smith's Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee (Faber and Faber) and Nadine Cohadas' Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington (Pantheon) for the daily newspaper. Both Canada Lee and Dinah Washington were African-American pioneers in the world of entertainment, helping to achieve equal rights for African-Americans in both movies and music in the 1940's.
Canada Lee, a former jockey, welterweight boxer and bandleader turned-Broadway actor, fought hard for African-American presence in both movies and in the United States Army. Isserman writes "For nearly two decades," Smith argues, "Lee battled stereotyped roles offered to black artists . . . [and] sought to bring black history, culture, and issues to mainstream audiences." He was determined to use his fame and influence to better the lives of his own people. "He battled Jim Crow and lynching; . . . urged African Americans to take pride in their heritage; decried the horrors of apartheid in South Africa; and raised money for anticolonialist movements." Smith's lucid, well-researched and sympathetic but not uncritical life of Canada Lee should go some distance toward reviving the memory of this activist native son."
Dinah Washington, an African-American lounger singer from Chicago, began her musical career as a small-time lounge singer. After being discovered in a small Chicago lounge, Washington went on to becoming "Queen," short for both the "Queen of the Blues" and the "Queen of the Jukebox." Isserman writes: "Cohadas' exhaustively researched biography of Washington is in some ways a standard show-biz narrative. Every major performance and recording session seems to have been included. And so has every personal setback Washington experienced… in some ways Cohadas' Queen rises above the limitations of the usual star bio, particularly in its grasp of Washington's role as cultural innovator, a woman who moved over the years from gospel to blues to pop to jazz and wound up posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."
