Not many actors have their portraits on the walls of a museum, so imagine my surprise when I came upon someone with that honor — Leigh Whipper. Painted by the esteemed African American artist Lois Mailou Jones, I had no idea who Leigh Whipper was, staring at his image hanging in the Brooklyn Museum. Curious, I discovered that among his many credits were his being the first African American to join Actors' Equity in 1920 ("Equity didn't even know I was Black"). He was also a co-founder (with composer Noble Sissle) of the Negro Actors Guild of America. He appeared on Broadway in such landmark dramas as Dorothy and DuBose Heyward's Porgy (1927), the play upon which the musical Porgy and Bess was based, and John Steinbeck's adaptation of his novel Of Mice and Men (1937), directed by George S. Kaufman. In it, Whipper created the part of Crooks; a role he repeated for the 1939 film version. He was also an accomplished songwriter and music publisher whose career spanned sixty-five years. Whipper lived until just shy of his ninety-ninth birthday and, though blind as the result of an unsuccessful cataract operation six years prior, told a journalist shortly before he died, "I haven't retired. If you give me a part, I'll take it."

Now THAT'S an actor!

To start at the beginning, Leigh Rollin Whipper was born in 1876, only eleven years past the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Born in the Deep South of Charleston, South Carolina, his parents were both free and accomplished individuals. His father, William Whipper (1834-1907), was a trial lawyer, circuit court judge, Brigadier General, state legislator and abolitionist who, during Reconstruction, had a major part in creating South Carolina's new state government. Leigh's mother, Frances Rollin Whipper (1845-1901), also born to free Black parents (her father was a successful lumber merchant), was herself a political activist, teacher, and author. She would later attend Howard University to become one of the first Black women physicians in the United States. A single mom after divorcing her husband, Frances raised young Leigh and his sister Ionia in Washington, D.C., where after attending public school, both children went on to college; Ionia becoming a physician like her mother, while young Leigh went to Howard University and then its law school, from which he graduated in 1895. Though admitted to the State Bar of South Carolina, he never practiced as an attorney.

Perhaps his heart was never really in the law, considering Whipper told the Associated Press near the end of his life that "the first time I went to the theatre, I was six or seven years old, and I took a loving for acting. I went to see Uncle Tom's Cabin