Etta Moten

Etta Moten Barnett, born November 5, 1901, in Weimar, Texas, was an American actress and contralto vocalist whose Broadway career spanned from 1931 to 1946. The only child of a Methodist minister, Rev. Freeman F. Moten, and his wife Ida Norman Moten, a teacher, she began singing in her church choir as a child. Her family prioritized education, enrolling her in strong schools as they relocated. She attended Paul Quinn College's secondary school in Waco, Texas, then Western University, a historically Black college in Quindaro, Kansas, where she studied music. To fund her tuition, she sang with a quartet on Topeka's WREN radio, performed on the Chautauqua circuit, and spent summers with the Jackson Jubilee Singers. She completed her studies at the University of Kansas, earning a B.A. in voice and drama in 1931 and becoming the first student to present a recital in the newly constructed Hoch Auditorium on that campus. She was also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

After a brief teaching contract at Lincoln University ended when her father arranged her move to New York, Moten began performing as a soloist with the Eva Jessye Choir. Her Broadway debut came in 1931 with the musical revue Fast and Furious, written by Zora Neale Hurston. She subsequently appeared in the play Zombie in 1932. In 1933, she appeared in two musical films: Flying Down to Rio, in which she sang "The Carioca," and Gold Diggers of 1933, a Busby Berkeley production in which she played a war widow and performed "My Forgotten Man" alongside Joan Blondell. That same year she dubbed the singing voice of Theresa Harris in Professional Sweetheart. On January 31, 1934, Moten performed "The Forgotten Man" for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at his birthday celebration, making her the first African American to perform at the White House in the twentieth century, the first to do so in over fifty years since Marie Selika Williams performed for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878.

George Gershwin had written the role of Bess in Porgy and Bess with Moten in mind and discussed the part with her directly. She initially hesitated, concerned that the role exceeded her natural contralto range. For the 1942 revival, the part of Bess was rewritten to accommodate her voice. She also refused to sing the word "nigger" in the libretto, and Ira Gershwin subsequently removed it. Moten performed the role of Bess on Broadway and with the national touring company through 1945, and the character became her signature role. Her Broadway credits also include the 1946 production of Lysistrata, performed with an all-Black cast.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Moten Barnett hosted a Chicago radio program called I Remember When, which historian Angela Tate has described as perhaps the first Black woman's radio broadcast created for Black listeners that also reached a broader audience. Dozens of recordings of the program are held at the Library of Congress and the Schomburg Library in New York City. The United States government appointed her as a representative on cultural missions to ten African nations. On March 6, 1957, she interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Accra, Ghana, where both were attending the celebration of Ghana's independence from Great Britain. She attended as the wife of Claude Barnett, a prominent member of the official U.S. delegation headed by Vice President Richard Nixon. The recording of that conversation, made in a Ghanaian radio studio, is also preserved at the Library of Congress and the Schomburg Library.

In her personal life, Moten married Curtis Brooks around 1918; the two had three daughters, Sue, Gladys, and Etta Vee, before divorcing after six years. In 1934 she married Claude Albert Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press in Chicago. They remained married for thirty-three years until his death in 1967. She stopped performing in 1952 after doctors discovered a cyst on her vocal cords that required surgery. Following Claude Barnett's death, she became deeply involved in Chicago civic life, contributing to the National Council of Negro Women, the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Field Museum, the DuSable Museum, and the South Side Community Art Center. She served on the boards of The Links and Alpha Kappa Alpha, and participated in International Women's Year activities during the 1980s.

Among her honors, Moten Barnett received a citation of merit from the University of Kansas in 1943, was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1979, received the Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1983, and was awarded the Order of Lincoln from the State of Illinois in 1993. She received honorary degrees from Atlanta University, Spelman College, the University of Illinois, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and North Carolina Central University. Etta Moten Barnett died of pancreatic cancer at Chicago's Mercy Hospital on January 2, 2004, at the age of 102.