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BERT WILLIAMS, THE JACKIE ROBINSON OF THE AMERICAN THEATER

© Joyce E. Eberly

Although relatively unknown today, Bert Williams was the first black performer to appear in white musical shows. One account states that Egbert Austin Williams was born in Antigua, the West Indies in 1875, and that his family emigrated from the West Indies to Riverside, California, in 1885. Other records indicate he was born in 1874in Nassau, the Bahamas. Since he was light skinned, his birth certificate lists him as being of "mixed race." The family's emigration to the United States also shows that they may have first gone to Florida, then to California.

With no ambitions to go into show business, Bert claimed to have graduated from high school in 1893 and planned to attend Stanford University to become an engineer. Why this did not occur is not clear, but it's likely that in those days of racial barriers his ambitions were impossible to fulfill. Eventually he became a singing waiter in hotels. In 1893, the year he said he had graduated from high school, he joined Martin and Selig's Minstrel Show based in San Francisco. Other accounts state that he joined Lew Johnson's minstrel tour of lumbering camps in northern California. To his chagrin, he discovered he had to play what were called "nigger" characters. Also at this time, he joined forces with another African American performer, George Walker. For the next two years, they struggled as singers and comedians in second rate establishments until they began to publish songs in 1895. Thus encouraged, they decided to go east and try to break into the big time. During their travels east, they were almost lynched in Cripple Creek, Colorado, by a mob who "decided the pair's clothing was too fine for African Americans" and forced them to remove their clothing and wear burlap. By the time they reached Chicago, they were in rags. Finally, they found work as minstrels wearing blackface. Williams emerged as the comedian of the team when his makeup ran down his face in streaks. This proved to have a comic effect, which Williams perfected as a stereotyped kind of African American: "the humble, shiftless, slouch Negro who could neither read nor write but who had a certain hard, and not altogether inaccurate, philosophy of life."

Eventually they arrived in New York in 1896 and worked as featured performers in various vaudeeville houses. During this period, they added two women to their act. One of them, Aida Reed Overton, became Walker's wife. Their fortunes took a turn upwards when they met the producer William Marion Cook in 1898. Cook and the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar collaborated on a play, "Senegambian Carnival," which became the first touring play to revolve around Williams and Walker. They then appeared in "A Lucky Coon" and "The Policy Players," but their biggest hit was "Sons of Ham," which lasted two seasons. The two partners appeared in several more plays together, including "Abyssinia," in 1906. It was in this play that Williams introduced the song, "Nobody." This became so identified with Williams that he had to sing it at every performance for the rest of his life.

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