KNOW 1 RADIO

Madame Sul-Te-Wan was born on September 12, 1873 as Nellie Conley in Louisville, Kentucky where her widowed mother worked as a laundress. Madame Sul-Te-Wan was a pioneering stage and film actress who became one of the most prominent black performers in Hollywood during the silent film era. Her career spanned more than seventy years and she is best known as the first African American actress contracted to appear in D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking and racist cinematic epic, Birth of a Nation (1915).

According to silent screen star Lillian Gish, the full story is forever lost to history because, “no one was bold enough to ask.”

Over the course of her career, Madame Sul-Te-Wan didn’t just craft an intriguing star persona. She forced her foot in the door of the film industry, becoming the first black actress to land a studio contract, carving out a place for herself in the emerging Hollywood scene.

Madame Sul-Te-Wan’s interest in performing was awakened when she delivered laundry to Louisville’s Buckingham Theater where the white actresses who were her mother’s customers often invited young Nellie in to watch the shows. Two white actresses, Mary Anderson and F***y Davenport, wrangled an audition for her at a talent contest at the Buckingham which the youngster won. Moving to Cincinnati, Ohio with her mother, Madame Sul-Te-Wan worked in dance troupes and theater companies throughout the East and Midwest billed as “Creole Nell.” She later formed her own musical performing company, The Black Four Hundred. She reconstituted the group as the Rair Back Minstrels and toured the East Coast to great acclaim.

Madame Sul-Te-Wan married in 1910, gave birth to three sons, and moved her family to Arcadia, California where she hoped to break into California’s burgeoning film industry. Within two years of arriving in California, her husband deserted them just three weeks after she gave birth to the youngest of their three boys, leaving them destitute. Madame Sul-Te-Wan accepted charitable assistance and worked as a domestic in between stints as a singer and dancer in Southern California. In 1915, on learning that D.W. Griffith, a native of her hometown, was making a movie about the antebellum South and Reconstruction, the actress personally plead her case to the filmmaker and won a part in the cast of Birth of a Nation. Griffith was in the middle of filming Nation, his blockbuster revisionist history of the Reconstruction era, when Sul-Te-Wan approached him. There are conflicting accounts on what she said or did to catch his attention—at least one story features a costume of “a red satin turban, long shiny braids that nearly reached her knees, and shiny gold earrings.” But she evidently sold Griffith on her pitch. He gave her a job, paying her a salary of $3 a day. That initial offer eventually increased to a $25-per-week contract, the film critic Ashley Clark writes. Most of her role however, like that of the other black actors in the film, was deleted from the final cut. Although Sul-Te-Wan appeared in The Birth of a Nation as an uncredited extra, Griffith reportedly scripted a much meatier character for her. She was meant to play a rich black landowner, strolling through town in fine clothes and jewelry. When a white woman slights her, Sul-Te-Wan returns the insult by spitting in her face. The scene was apparently cut by censors, relegating the actress to mob scenes. Still, it was a film role, and with a letter of recommendation from Griffith, Sul-Te-Wan was able to book others. When the film was complete, Madam Sul-Te-Wan was discharged from Griffiths’ film company for “allegedly stealing a book from a white actress and inciting blacks to protest the film’s showing in the Los Angeles area.” Hiring prominent African American attorney E. Burton Ceruti, she successfully defended herself against the charges and was reinstated in the company.

Sul-Te-Wan was rarely mentioned in the mainstream white press outside the occasional cast list, though her turn as Tituba, a slave and accused witch in Maid of Salem, garnered some rare notice. (She was also praised for her “authentic portrayal” in Silver Screen and “stand out” performance in Film Daily.) If Sul-Te-Wan was overlooked in film publications, however, she was celebrated in the black press. Newspapers like The California Eagle featured items on new Sul-Te-Wan roles to catch in theaters, her second marriage, and her son Onest’s budding film career. In these pages, she was a living legend. To readers, she was even more beloved.

The proof is in the letters to the editor. After Sul-Te-Wan was snubbed at the In*******al Film and Radio Guild awards in 1948, an incensed reader named Callie Stewart wrote to the newspaper. “I defy you to produce one current actor or actress who can touch Madame’s great dramatic ability,” Stewart wrote. “…[She is] your oldest, most charming, and most respected actress of today.” The letter, which stretches over several columns, isn’t merely a rant from a fan, upset that her favorite actress lost a statue. It’s a rallying cry for Sul-Te-Wan’s legacy, one that is less discussed today, but that the black actresses who followed Madame could never forget.

She continued to work in film until her death at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills on February 1, 1959.

Congrats to the Budbilliken Parade for a successful 90th anniversary event!!! Can't wait for next year!