Hazel Scott, American heroine.

Hazel Scott with Charles Mingus and Rudy Nichols 

in the service of a worthy cause, the 1955 March of Dimes fight against polio.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago in the year 1920, Hazel Scott was four when her family moved to New York City.  Considered a musical prodigy, Scott began studying classical piano at The Juilliard School at the age of eight.  While still in high school Ms. Scott had her own WOR radio show and was regularly gigging.  Up until the early 1940's most of the top jazz clubs had segregated audiences or were white-only establishments but the developing trend of smaller ensembles playing in smaller clubs would begin to erode jazz segregation.  In a 2009 article for Smithsonian, biographer Karen Chilton details Hazel Scott's strong resistance to American apartheid:

There was little separation between Hazel's performance and her outspoken politics.  She attributed it to being raised by very, strong-willed, independent-minded women.  She was one of the first black entertainers to refuse to play before segregated audiences.  Written in all her contracts was a standing clause that required forfeiture if there was a dividing line between the races.  "Why would anyone come to hear me, a negro, and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?," she asked.

In the early 1940's, Scott appeared in a number of Hollywood films including the George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945).  Chilton describes how Scott demanded the studios provide pay equal to that of her white counterparts also refusing any role that depicted blacks as subservient.  Scott staged a three day strike on the set of The Heat's On (1943) protesting the apron costumes black actresses were expected to wear.  In the film, Ms. Scott plays a sergeant in the WAC's, excerpt below:

 

No aprons here!

 In 1950 The Hazel Scott Show premiered on the DumontTelevision Network.  Hazel Scott had become the first black performer to host her own nationally syndicated television program.  It would be short lived.  Just as the show began to air Scott's name appeared in Red Channels, a publication of the right-wing Counterattack that would serve as the template for the Hollywood Blacklist.  Consequently Scott was targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and shortly after she voluntarily appeared before HUAC, The Hazel Scott Show was cancelled.  After concert bookings began to dry up Hazel Scott moved to Paris in the late 1950's not returning to the U.S. until 1967.



 

Counterattack

fascist American newsletter.

Booklet commissioned by Roy Brewer, senior representative of International Alliance of Theatrical State Employees (IATSE) and personal friend of Ronald Reagan.  Hazel Scott's inclusion was likely due to her civil rights activism and regular appearances at Cafe Society in New York's Greenwich Village. 

Stylin' and exilin' in Paris

Le Désordre et la Nuit’(1958)

Let it be said once and for all that the persons responsible for Red Channels, Counterattack, and the blacklist have more in common with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin than any of the individuals whose lives and careers they sought to destroy.  The Hollywood studios, corporations, Republicans and Democrats who accomodated this American fascist movement betrayed the constitution, their country, and their fellow citizens.  The actions of these individuals reveal their traitorous intent. Their failure to stand up for liberty and justice, and their fealty to authoritarian corporatism expose them as disloyal, Constitution hating, fascist scum.