Historical Info and Gallery
Loren Miller
“You will be a lawyer after all; a lawyer to confound these fools with their own laws giving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Son of a Black, former slave, and a white mother, Loren Miller was born in 1903 and raised in Nebraska with his 6 siblings. He attended Kansas University, Howard University then finally Washburn University where he received his law degree. He was disheartened and frustrated by the racism he encountered in and around KU and Washburn. But he also became disenchanted with Howard after observing how students who shared his lighter complexion treated their darker skinned peers. After moving to Los Angeles Loren won several high-profile civil rights cases in which Blacks were denied service and housing or were victims of police harassment and brutality. He argued in front of the California Supreme court and effectively won the cause of ending the Alien Land Laws that allowed districts to deny or severely restrict the leasing and buying of property by Japanese immigrants. With Thurgood Marshall, he argued before the U.S. Supreme court in the Shelley v. Kraemer case in 1948 which led to the abolition of racially restrictive housing covenants. Miller also wrote the majority of the laws briefs in the Brown v. Board of Education case. He was also an award-winning writer and poet. It was writing, not the law, that was always his first love.
Hattie McDaniel
“I can be a maid for $7 a week or I can play a maid for $700 a week.”
Hattie McDaniel, born in 1893, was the youngest of 13 children (only 7 of which lived beyond the age of 13) and grew up in extreme poverty. Her father petitioned repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully, for the pension he was owed for his service in the Union Army and the wounds he suffered while heroically fighting in the Battle of Nashville. In her teenage years Hattie found her way onto the stage where she became known within the Black community as a sharp satirist and a powerful blues singer. She landed her first Hollywood role in 1931 and quickly won acclaim and success. In 1939 she was cast in the role of Mammy in Gone With The Wind. McDaniel chose to play Mammy as a woman who forcefully made her opinions heard rather than meekly offering them and who wasn’t afraid to show her disapproval of certain white individuals within her midst. Her performance earned her the first Oscar ever awarded to a Black entertainer. But she wasn’t allowed to attend the racially segregated premier of Gone With The Wind and at the Oscars she was seated separately from her white co-stars. Members of the Black press and the head of the NAACP rebuked her and other Black actors for taking demeaning roles. Defiant and unapologetic in the face of this criticism Hattie used the money she made to furnish both a luxurious lifestyle and to help support her many siblings and their children. Friends claimed she was generous to a fault. McDaniel went on to become a major force in the fight against racial housing discrimination.
Ethel Waters
“Ours is the truest dignity of man, the dignity of the undefeated.”
Ethel Waters birth in 1896 was the result of the rape of her 12-year-old mother. Unwanted by her parents Waters describes being shuffled around between relatives throughout her childhood and recalls learning how to steal food from stores by the age of six. She married at the age of 13 to a man twice her age but left the marriage within a year after being subjected to physical abuse. She secured her first acting job at 17 performing in a Vaudeville show and soon went on to record an album that found success with both black and white audiences. A subsequent tour brought her more accolades and fame, although her tour through the South landed her in trouble after she refused to show subservience to the white individuals around her. In 1929 she sang in the Hollywood film, On With the Show, making her one of the first Black actors to perform in talkies. She went on to find success on Broadway as well. In 1950 she became the first Black woman to star in her own television show and soon thereafter the first Black woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy. But her successes didn’t bring stability to her personal life. She was married and divorced three times. Many who knew her claim she was bisexual and well known within the gay community. Waters never spoke publicly about that aspect of her sexuality but did boast about her drag queen friends who won competitions wearing gowns she had personally lent them.
John Alexander Somerville and Vada Watson Somerville
“I also dream how much more glorious our land would be if all lived up to the true ideals of Americanism.”
—J.A. Somerville
John Alexander Somerville was born in 1882 in Jamaica and Vada Watson was born in 1885 in Pomona, CA. When they married in Los Angeles in 1912 the two quickly became a Black, Los Angeles Power Couple.
In 1907 John became the first black graduate of University of Southern California’s (USC) Dentistry School, graduating with high honors and passing the State dental board exam with the highest scores in the State. Vada also graduated from USC’s Dentistry School and become the first black woman dentist in the State of California. Together they founded the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP. They invested in real estate and built affordable housing that welcomed the African Americans who were flooding into Los Angeles to escape the Jim Crow South. John and Vada would go on to build a luxury hotel they called Hotel Somerville. The venture cost $250,000 (Just under $4.7 million in today’s dollars). They raised the money by securing lease agreements for shops and offices. They also crowdsourced funding through stocks. The Hotel was designed by a black architect and built with all black contractors. The opening attracted 2000 people and was seen as the most elite Black hotel in the country. While the Somervilles lost the hotel after the 1929 stock market crash (it came under new ownership and was re-Christened the Dunbar Hotel) they were able to rebuild their fortune through their dental practice and other investments. Their Civil Rights activism led to a close friendship with W.E.B. Du Bois and meetings with Franklin D Roosevelt and other high-level politicians. John became a published author, went on to be the first African American to serve on the Los Angeles Police Commission and was honored by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions in Anglo-American affairs. Vada helped establish the National Council of Negro Women and established the Pilgrim House Community Center designed to take care of the health needs of black families who migrated to LA during WWII.
Norman O. Houston
“Almost Any Negro—except those who play them—can spot an Uncle Tom.”
Norman O. Houston was born in 1883 in San Jose, California. He attended UC Berkeley but was drafted into WWI before completing his degree. He served as the regimental personnel adjutant of his division becoming the only Black man in the U.S. Army to hold that position. After the war Houston moved to Los Angeles where he sold insurance. The white owned insurance companies required Houston to sell overpriced and limited policies to African Americans. This practice plus the inability to secure home loans served to repress Black homeownership. In response, Houston along with several other Black professionals founded Liberty Savings and Loan Association specifically for the purpose of serving African Americans. The company tripled its assets in two years. Shortly thereafter Houston accepted an offer to join fellow Black insurance men, William Nickerson Jr. and George A. Beavers Jr. in starting up Golden State Mutual, an insurance company that would offer African Americans full coverage life insurance at reasonable rates. Houston raised the necessary $15,000 in start-up costs (over $250,000 in today’s dollars). Within three years of opening they had grown to over 100 employees and they expanded into offering home and business insurance plans. In 1938 the company began to open branches out of state making Golden State the biggest Black owned insurance company west of the Mississippi. Norman Houston and his wife, Edythe Houston were the first African Americans to move into the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Adam Heights. Upon hearing of the Houstons plans to buy the home, 100 white property owners in the neighborhood tried instating a community-wide racial covenant that would prevent Blacks from living in the area unless they were domestic servants. However, the woman selling her home to the Houstons refused to sign on and the sale was made.
Louise Beavers
“I am only playing the parts. I don’t live them.”
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1902, Louise Beavers moved to Pasadena, California with her family when she was eleven. As a teenager she aspired to be a doctor, but the obstacles put in front of Black women caused her to abandon that pursuit. Gifted with a beautiful singing voice, Beavers toured with an all-woman “minstrel troupe” in 1926 and in 1927 landed her first Hollywood role in Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was followed by many more offers. She quickly became the most famous Black woman in Hollywood. The studios pushed her to eat excessively so she could be heavy enough to play the “Black mammy” roles that were available for Black women. In 1934, Louise Beavers took the role of Delilah in Imitation of Life. She played a maid whose light skinned daughter rejects her in order to pass as white. It was the first major studio film that allowed a Black actress to have her own storyline that was somewhat separate from the white cast. Despite this, the Black press was split on the merits of the film. Many applauded Beavers performance but others excoriated the film for depicting the character of Delilah as being eagerly subservient to her white employer and removing all references to racism from the script. Beavers fiercely defended the movie but also went on to take roles in two independent Black films which allowed her to briefly break out of the stereotypical roles she had always been cast in. On a personal level, Louise was reportedly the exact opposite of the meek maids she portrayed on screen. She hated cleaning, left the cooking to her husband, held weekly late-night poker matches in her three-story home, was often seen ringside at boxing matches and was notoriously willing to speak her mind when challenged.
Lena Horne
“Always be smarter than the people who hire you.”
Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn in 1917. At 16 she dropped out of school to join the chorus line of the Cotton Club. She went on to record several records, toured around the country and performed in musical variety shows and nightclubs. In 1942 the head of the NAACP, Walter White brought Horne to a meeting with the top Hollywood filmmakers and held her up as the kind of Black actress Hollywood should be casting. This immediately made her a target of resentment for many of the more established Hollywood Black actors, although Hattie McDaniel, who blamed White, not Horne for the insult, became Lena’s close friend, advocate and defender. MGM cast Horne in the studio’s first two all Black films. But every other role she was offered was for minor parts in white films and the studio regularly edited out her scenes for Southern audiences. During WWII Lena Horne often performed for the troops. However, when she arrived at Fort Riley in Kansas to perform for Black soldiers she was told that the German POWs being detained there were also being allowed to attend the show. The POWs were given preferential seats in front of the Black soldiers. Enraged, Horne walked past the POWs and sang directly to the Black soldiers before storming off. Similarly, it was her intolerance of prejudice that led Horne to abandon Hollywood and move back to New York. But her career was only beginning as she became one of the most successful nightclub singers of her time. She also recorded what would be the bestselling record by a female recording artist in RCA history. She was always politically active, suing restaurants that refused to serve Black patrons, participating in the March On Washington and being an active member of many progressive organizations.
Clark Gable
“When I die they’ll put on my tombstone, ‘He was lucky and he knew it.’”
Clark Gable was born in 1901 in Ohio. At 21 he would start taking roles in traveling tent shows. He met acting coach, Josephine Dillon in Portland, OR. She coached him and personally paid to have his teeth fixed and hair styled. The two married in 1924. Dillon helped him land a role on Broadway where critics celebrated his performance. In 1930 Gable and Dillon divorced and he moved to Los Angeles where he signed with MGM. The studio gave him increasingly larger roles and he developed a reputation for having affairs with his female costars. He also became close friends with Hattie McDaniel whom he met while filming 1935 film, China Seas. In 1939 he married actress Carol Lombard who was reportedly his greatest love. It was also in 1939 that he reluctantly accepted the role of Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. When he stepped on the set he saw that it was segregated with signs for “Whites” and “Coloreds” facilities. Gable told the studio that if the signs weren’t removed, he would quit. That ended the on-set segregation. Later, when McDaniel wasn’t allowed to attend the segregated premiere of the movie Gable threatened to boycott. He only backed down after McDaniel convinced him to go. Five years into his marriage, Lombard was killed in a plane crash. Devastated, Gable enlisted in the army to serve as an aircraft gunner. Hitler was obsessed with Gable and offered an award to anyone who could capture him alive and unharmed. The admiration was one sided. Gable completed several missions that resulted in significant German losses and earned would the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service. After the war he returned to acting. His last film was The Misfits with Montgomery Cliff and Marilyn Monroe.
The Dunbar Hotel
“…an extraordinary surprise to a people fed on ugliness—ugly schools, ugly churches, ugly streets, ugly insults…it was so unexpected, so startling, so beautiful.”
—W.E.B. Du Bois on The Dunbar Hotel
In the 1920s elite hotels were exclusively for whites while Blacks were relegated to run down hotels in noncentral locations. Vada and John Alexander Somerville wanted to build a hotel for African Americans that defied expectations. They established an investment company and raised $250,000 (over $4,600,000 today). They used an all-Black team of craftsmen, contractors and workers to construct the hotel. They initially called it Hotel Somerville. Upon its opening in 1928 it was visited by Black dignitaries from across the country. It immediately became the It hotel among the Black elite. Josephine Baker, Jack Johnson, Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, Joe Luis, Duke Ellington all stayed there. The Somervilles lost the hotel after the 1929 crash. Under new ownership it was rechristened The Dunbar Hotel after Black poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar. A nightclub was added and Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong all played there. The Dunbar changed hands several times between its 1928 opening and its 1974 closure. In the 70s and 80s it was allowed to slip into disrepair. However there was a growing movement to save the property. Renovations were done in 1990 and then again in 2011 when it was converted into a facility for low-income senior housing. It continues in that capacity today but the lobby remains mostly as it was and conveys the elegance that was at the essence of this groundbreaking hotel.