Canada Lee

Canada Lee, born Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegata on March 3, 1907, in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, was an American actor and former professional boxer whose Broadway career spanned from 1934 to 1948. His father, James Cornelius Lionel Canegata, had emigrated from St. Croix to New York, where he married Lydia Whaley Gadsen and raised their son in Harlem. Lee is the father of actor Carl Lee.

Before reaching the stage, Lee pursued three distinct careers in succession. Beginning at age seven, he studied violin and piano under J. Rosamond Johnson at the Music School Settlement for Colored People, making a student recital debut at Aeolian Hall at age eleven. After seven years of music training, he abandoned his studies and left home, traveling to Saratoga Springs in 1921 at age fourteen to work as a jockey for two years. Returning to Harlem in 1923, he took up boxing at the suggestion of a school friend. His professional name came about by accident when fight announcer Joe Humphries misread "Canagata, Lee" on a card and announced him as "Canada Lee," a name he adopted permanently. In the amateur ranks, Lee won 90 of 100 bouts and claimed the national amateur lightweight title before turning professional in October 1926 at age nineteen.

Standing five feet nine inches and weighing approximately 144 pounds, Lee competed as a welterweight. Boxing historian Donald R. Koss documents 60 bouts between 1927 and 1931, while the New York Times reported approximately 200 professional matches with roughly 25 losses. During a ten-round bout against Andy Divodi at Madison Square Garden on December 12, 1929, a blow above his right ear detached his retina. Concealing the injury to protect his career, Lee eventually lost all sight in that eye and retired from boxing in 1933. Despite earning an estimated $90,000 during his boxing career, he was broke by the time he quit. He later advocated publicly for insurance, health care, financial guidance, and retirement homes for professional fighters. Following his boxing career, Lee led a small dance band that played at clubs in the area, receiving a boost when sportswriter Ed Sullivan mentioned him in his entertainment column. The band's career peaked in 1933 with an engagement at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Lee subsequently opened a small club called The Jitterbug, which operated for six months before closing.

His acting career began by chance in 1934 when, while visiting a YMCA to apply for work as a laborer, Lee encountered an audition in progress and was recognized by playwright Augustus Smith. He won a supporting role in Brother Mose, directed by Frank H. Wilson, which toured New York's boroughs under the sponsorship of the Civil Works Administration. In October 1934, he succeeded Rex Ingram in the Theatre Union's revival of Stevedore, which traveled to Chicago, Detroit, and other cities following its Broadway run, marking his first professional acting role. Lee then secured the role of Banquo in the Federal Theatre Project's celebrated 1936 production of Macbeth, adapted and directed by Orson Welles with an all-Black cast. The production sold out for ten weeks at the Lafayette Theatre, ran an additional two weeks on Broadway, and subsequently toured the country, including performances at the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas.

After five months in that supporting role, Lee succeeded Rex Ingram as the lead in the Federal Theatre Project production of Haiti in 1938, portraying Haitian slave-turned-emperor Henri Christophe. The production drew approximately 90,000 audience members at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and at Boston's Copley Theatre. In January 1939, Lee joined the Broadway production of Mamba's Daughters, based on DuBose Heyward's 1929 novel, which toured North America and returned to Broadway for an additional run in 1940. That same year he played the lead in the Negro Playwrights Company's revival of Theodore Ward's Big White Fog, a production originally staged by the Federal Theatre Project in 1938 and remounted by an organization founded by Ward, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Theodore Browne, Richard Wright, and Alain Locke.

Lee's most prominent stage achievement came with Native Son in 1941, an adaptation of Richard Wright's novel directed by Orson Welles on Broadway. He starred in the initial New York run, a nineteen-month national tour, and a subsequent Broadway revival. Among his other Broadway credits were The Tempest, South Pacific, On Whitman Avenue, The Duchess of Malfi, and Set My People Free. His Broadway appearances continued through 1948.

Outside the theatre, Lee made his film debut in Keep Punching in 1939 and his radio debut as narrator of the CBS jazz series Flow Gently, Sweet Rhythm from 1940 to 1941. He also operated a restaurant in Harlem called Canada Lee's Chicken Coop, located at 102 West 136th Street, which offered South Carolina cuisine alongside jazz and blues despite ongoing financial difficulties.

A champion of civil rights throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Lee was blacklisted during the Red Scare era and died on May 9, 1952, shortly before he was scheduled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was recognized as a figure who advanced the African-American tradition in theatre alongside actors such as Paul Robeson.