Dora Dean: "The Black Venus"

 

This site allows a look into the colorful and accomplished life of Dora Dean, a beautiful women from kentucky who infiltrated show business and reinvented it for many African American performers to come. As a black women emerging on the scene at the end of the nineteenth century she definetly could not have had an easy time of it.

 

At this time life was extremely difficult for, not only African Americans, but African American women. Therefore it was especially for  an African American women trying to make a respectable and empowering name for themselves doing anything, but particularly in show business. She had to work hard at her act, adding new and unheard of technologies whilst enduring the wrath of those who felt she needed to stay in her place.

 

However, that just wouldn’t fly for Dean, as well as her equally determined partner and future husband Charles Johnson. She was bent on the world perceiving her as she did herself: as a serious performer deemed as much respect and adulation as any white performer. Dean did not seem to mind angering those who thought she was trying to be something she had no business being.