Trivia: Nat "King" Cole is best remembered as an extremely popular and influential jazz and pop artist whose career spanned the mid-'30s through the early '60s -- some of his biggest hits include "Mona Lisa" and "Unforgettable" -- but he also made a few appearances in film. As an actor, his most famous role is that of W.C. Handy in St. Louis Blues (1958). The father of pop singer Natalie Cole, he was only 46 when he died of lung cancer.

Trivia: Born in the South and raised in Harlem, sultry black actress/singer Eartha Kitt attended New York's High School of Performing Arts. After touring with Katherine Dunham's dance troupe, Kitt headlined at choice nightclubs in both Paris and the U.S. She made her acting debut as Helen of Troy in Orson Welles' 1951 staging of Faust. The following year, she came to Broadway in the musical revue New Faces of 1952 in which she stopped the show on a nightly basis with her sensuous rendition of "C'est Si Bon." It was the first of many top-ten hits for Kitt, who was one of a handful of black performers of the 1950s to receive regular air play on "white" radio stations. Subsequent Broadway appearances included the role of Mehitabel the alley cat in the 1958 musical Shinbone Alley. Though considered a "crossover" performer, Kitt's movie appearances were often confined to films with predominantly African American casts, e.g. Anna Lucasta (1958) and St. Louis Blues (1958). She made several well-received TV guest appearances in the 1950s and 1960s, unexpectedly gaining a flock of preteen fans for her portrayal of The Catwoman on a 1967 installment of Batman. Never one to shy away from controversy, Kitt was banned from the White House for several years after making a series of anti-Vietnam statements within earshot of Lady Bird Johnson. Nor has she been a controversial figure only to the white mainstream: she was once booed off the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theatre, reportedly because the audience didn't care for her condescending onstage demeanor. After several years in England, Kitt returned to the U.S. to co-star in the 1975 Pam Grier vehicle Friday Foster. Back on Broadway in 1978, Kitt starred in the musical Timbuktu, an all-black reworking of the old stage chestnut Kismet. Her sporadic film appearances from 1980 onward included her manic (and all too brief) portrayal of a centuries-old witch in Ernest Scared Stupid (1991). Eartha Kitt authored several books of memoirs, and in 1982 was the subject of the documentary film All By Myself. She died on Christmas Day in 2008 after a battle with colon cancer.

Trivia: Spirited black singer and actress of stage and screen, Bailey is the daughter of a preacher. She started her performing career at age 15 after winning an amateur contest, then went on to tour as a dancer appeaedr as a singer-dancer with various jazz bands. Her big break came with her debut on Broadway in the musical St. Louis Woman; her performance earned her a "most promising newcomer of 1946" award. Bailey became known for her throaty, sexy voice, down-to-earth personality, and jokey mischievousness. Her screen debut came as a guest star in Variety Girl, in which she sang "Tired," her first major hit. She eventually appeared in a number of stage and screen musicals, as well as landing several straight roles. In the late '60s she was awarded a Tony for her work in the title role of the all-black version of Broadway's Hello Dolly! Bailey hosted her own TV variety show in 1971, but retired from show biz in 1975. Also in 1975, she was named to the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Her autobiography, The Raw Pearl, appeared in 1968.

Trivia: One of the world's all-time greatest jazz singers for over 50 years and the queen of scat singing, Ella Fitzgerald has been the subject of numerous documentaries and performance videos. During the '50s, '60s, and '70s, she often appeared on television variety shows, daytime programs, and in specials. During the '70s, her voice could be heard shattering glass on Memorex ("Is it live or is it Memorex?") commercials. Earlier in her career, Fitzgerald made the occasional feature film appearance beginning with Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942).

Trivia: Inaugurating his performing career in Baltimore, African-American musical entertainer Cab Calloway organized his first band in New York. Calloway already had a strong following thanks to his recordings, when, in 1931, he replaced Duke Ellington as orchestra leader at Harlem's fabled Cotton Club. His lively, athletic performing style, coupled with his trademarked "Hi De Ho" delivery, was given nationwide exposure via his guest appearances in such Paramount features as The Big Broadcast (1932) and International House (1933). He also appeared in animated form in a cluster of Betty Boop cartoons produced by Max and Dave Fleischer, and it is safe to assume that the youngest cartoon fans in the audiences enjoyed Calloway's renditions of "Minnie the Moocher" and "St. James Infirmary Blues" without fully comprehending those songs' allusions to drug use and sex. George and Ira Gershwin used Calloway as the model for the character of Sportin' Life in their 1935 folk opera Porgy and Bess; though he initially turned down an offer to play the character in the original stage production because of a scheduling conflict, he was able to accept the role for a 1952 revival starring Leontyne Price and William Warfield. He also substituted for Sammy Davis Jr. on the soundtrack recording of the 1959 film version. Newly imposed censorship strictures required the uninhibited Calloway to tone down his performances and the content of his songs in films like The Singing Kid (1936) and Manhattan Merry-Go-Round (1937). The best of his "tame" film performances was in the 1943 20th Century Fox musical Stormy Weather, in which he co-starred with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lena Horne, and Dooley Wilson. Breaking up his orchestra in 1958, Calloway went solo for several years, notably as Horace Vandergelder in the all-black version of Broadway's Hello Dolly! As ebullient as ever, Calloway was seen fronting a band once more in 1980's The Blues Brothers. In 1976, Calloway wrote his autobiography, an engaging if not entirely candid work, titled Of Minnie the Moocher and Me. Cab Calloway is the father of actor Kirk Calloway.

Trivia: African-American stage, film, and TV luminary Ruby Dee was born in Cleveland, the daughter of a Pullman-porter father and schoolteacher mother. While growing up in Harlem, Dee developed an interest in the theater. In 1941, she began studying under Morris Carnovsky at the American Negro Theatre. While attending Hunter College, she made her first professional stage appearance in South Pacific (not the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but a short-lived 1943 drama). On Broadway from 1946, Dee's first major success was as the title character in Anna Lucasta. In 1948, she married actor Ossie Davis, with whom she appeared in everything from Shakespeare to TV margarine commercials. Though she and Davis were both uncredited in their joint film debut, 1950's No Way Out, Dee achieved second billing in her next feature, The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). Among her favorite stage roles were Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and Luttiebelle in her husband Ossie Davis' play Purlie Victorious, roles that she would commit to film in 1961 and 1963 respectively. On TV, Dee was a regular on The Guiding Light, Roots: The Next Generations, and The Middle Ages; Dee worked steadily throughout the 1970s, '80s, dividing her time more or less equally between television [with turns in such small-screen movies as The Atlanta Child Murders (1981), The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990) and the 1990 Decoration Day, for which she won an Emmy] and the big screen, where her credits included the features Cat People (1982), Cop and a Half (1993) and A Simple Wish (1997). Dee received a career resurgence thanks to her prominent enlistment in the features of Spike Lee (alongside Davis), notably Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991). As time rolled on, she also began to participate in documentaries, such as the 1998 Christianity: The First Thousand Years and the 1999 Smithsonian World: Nigerian Art - Kindred Spirits); made guest appearances in such prime-time series as Touched by an Angel; and essayed a prominent role opposite Halle Berry in the telemovie Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005). She continued to work steadily after Davis's death in early 2005, and in fact received her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar Nomination for her role in Ridley Scott's period crime saga American Gangster (2007). In 2011 she participated in Sing Your Song, a well-received biography of Harry Belafonte from HBO. In addition to her acting credits, Ruby Dee was an accomplished writer; she contributed a weekly column to New York's Amsterdam News, co-authored the script for the 1967 film Up Tight!, penned the 1975 TV play Twin-Bit Gardens, and published a book of poetry, Glowchild (1972).Dee died of natural causes in June 2014 at age 91.

Trivia: Hernandez was one of the first "new style" black screen actors, who neither sang nor danced but played characters just as white actors did. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro. In 1922 he first began performing onstage, working in an acrobatic act. Later he lived in the Caribbean and worked as a professional boxer under the name Kid Curley. He went on to work in a minstrel show, in circuses, and in vaudeville. He debuted on Broadway in 1927 in Show Boat. He played a few bit parts in the black audience-targeted films of Oscar Micheaux, and also worked as a radio scriptwriter. He broke through as a screen actor in Intruder in the Dust (1949), in which he played a proud black man wrongly accused of having killed a white Southerner. He played masculine, sensitive, individualistic men. After getting a number of solid roles, he was obliged to accept lesser roles in most of the films he made from the late '50s on. He continued acting until shortly before his death, working in both films and on TV.

Trivia: Jazz trumpeter Teddy Buckner spent most of his adult life playing in bands or leading one himself. The native Texan started out playing in a few bands on the West Coast, in the 1920s. In 1936, he began a brief stint with Lionel Hampton's band and when Hampton left to join Benny Goodman, Buckner took over the lead. He made the first of several film appearances in 1936, playing Louis Armstrong's double in Pennies From Heaven. His other film credits include Jack Webb's Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). In the 1980s, Buckner was a frequent performer at New Orleans Square in Disneyland.