Career Struggles
Calloway often struggled in the racially segregated and male-dominated music industry of the period. As an African American performer she had to frequently play to segregated audiences. While on tour in 1936, she used the women's bathroom at a gas station in Yazoo, Mississippi. In response, the police were called, an orchestra member was pistol whipped, and both he and Calloway were jailed for disorderly conduct and fined $7.50. While the two were in jail, another member stole the group's money and abandoned the band in Mississippi. The musicians went their own separate ways and Calloway sold her yellow Cadillac for cash to leave the state.
As a musician, Calloway had a reputation for being "exceptional", but was given few opportunities outside of being a singer or dancer due to gender roles of the time. Her flamboyant and, at times, provocative lyrics, challenged the stereotypes of what a "respectful" female performer was. By the mid-1930s Calloway began to struggle to find bookings, just as her brother's own career grew in popularity.
Read more about this topic: Blanche Calloway
Famous quotes containing the words career and/or struggles:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)