Anita Bush

Anita Bush was born on September 1, 1883, in Washington, DC, to Chapman Bush and Annie Elizabeth Bush, née Brown. When she was three years old, her family relocated to Brooklyn, New York, where her father worked as a master tailor and theatrical costumer serving numerous New York actors and performers. Through her father's work at the Bijou Theater, Bush was exposed to the vaudeville company of Bert Williams and George Walker, known as the Williams and Walker Co., whom she observed performing In Dahomey. She requested her father's permission to audition for the group, and at the age of 17 she was cast with the company, an opportunity that took her on tour internationally and set the foundation for her later work as a company founder.

With the Williams and Walker Co., Bush traveled to England and performed in the chorus of four of the company's productions. Her final appearance with the troupe was in the 1909 Broadway musical Mr. Lode of Koal. Following that production, she formed her own dance group, Anita Bush and her 8 Shimmy Babies, but a back injury forced her to stop dancing and redirected her focus toward dramatic theater. In the early twentieth century she also worked with Maria C. Downs on vaudeville acts and plays, and through a contract with a manager named Elmore, she engaged Billie Burke, a Harlem-based white director and playwright, to stage The Girl at the Fort, a light comedy featuring five characters. The cast Bush assembled for that production included Carlotta Freeman, Dooley Wilson, and Andrew S. Bishop, and the play opened at the Lincoln Theatre in November 1915.

Bush founded the Anita Bush Stock Company in 1915 after persuading Eugene "Frenchy" Elmore, the assistant manager of the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem, to allow her to mount a production within two weeks. The company presented a different play every two weeks over the following six weeks to considerable success. When Downs asked Bush to rename the company the Lincoln Players, Bush instead moved her operation to the Lafayette Theatre, opening there with a sketch titled Over the Footlights. In March 1916, the Lafayette Theatre purchased the rights to her company and renamed it the Lafayette Players. Bush subsequently organized four additional touring companies of the Lafayette Players, which traveled throughout the United States, mounting a new play each week. She remained with the company until 1920, when financial pressures led her to sell her rights to co-manager Lester Walton. Bush is credited with founding the Lafayette Players and establishing its reputation, as well as launching the careers of Charles Gilpin, Dooley Wilson, Evelyn Preer, and others. Her work with the company earned her the designation "The Little Mother of Colored Drama."

After departing the Lafayette Players, Bush pursued work in film. In 1921 she appeared in The Bull-Dogger, a production by Richard E. Norman's Norman Studios, one of the first companies to produce race films — films featuring African American characters in positive, non-stereotypical roles — starring Black rodeo cowboy Bill Pickett. The following year she starred in The Crimson Skull (1922) alongside vaudeville performer Lawrence Chenault, also featuring Pickett.

Her stage work across her career included In Dahomey in 1903, Antony and Cleopatra in 1914, Across the Footlights and Within the Law in 1915, The Octoroon or Life in Louisiana and Madame X in 1916, and both Very Good Eddie and Goethe's Faust during the 1917–1918 period. Anita Bush died on February 16, 1974, at the age of 90, at her home in the Bronx, New York.