This is FRESH AIR. Decades before there were music videos, there were soundies. In the 1940s, you could not only listen to your favorite bands and vocalists on records or the radio, but you could also ...

An early soundie in which Dorothy Dandridge Paul White sing A Zoot Suit with a Reet Pleat while getting dressed up for a big date ...

HARD, FIRM and invisible to the naked eye were the lines that kept African-American entertainers from many of the society cabarets and cafes of mid-20th-century New York. Fats Waller may have chuckled ...

Dorothy Dandridge was one of the great Hollywood starlets of the 1930s-1950s. As a black American actress, she made history for things like being the first black actress to receive an Academy Award in ...