Photo: Michael Claxton Collection.
Ellen Armstrong as a teenager in a costume she would typically wear while performing as a magician.
Among the many accomplished black Americans almost lost to history is a young female magician called Ellen Armstrong. Today we find out what Vanessa Armstrong at the New York Times (no relation) learned about this intriguing performer when she was assigned to write a belated obit.
“In December 1949, an article in Ebony magazine showcased a dozen Black magicians as ‘among America’s oldest entertainers although few in number.’ The sole woman among them was Ellen Armstrong,. …
“Armstrong began by practicing magic onstage with her father but later performed a solo act full of illusion and humor. One trick involved a blank pane of glass in a picture frame, where a cascade of sand fell from top to bottom when she turned it upside down. When the sand cleared, the frame held an image of someone famous, like the boxer Joe Louis. In another routine, called ‘Miser’s Dream,’ she made coins appear out of thin air and land with a miraculous clunk into a metal bucket. …
“Ellen Emma Armstrong was born on Dec. 27, 1905, in South Carolina to Ida [and] John Hartford Armstrong. The Armstrongs were a magic-performing dynasty, believed to be the first to come from and focus on the Black community. Her father started performing with his brother when he was a teenager. Later, he performed with Ellen’s mother, who died soon after giving birth to Ellen, and then with his second wife, Lillie Belle.
“Ellen was only 6 when she started performing with her father and stepmother, going by the name ‘Little Zelle,’ as they traveled to Black schools and churches along the East Coast, from Key West, Fla., to Philadelphia. … They performed during a time of legal segregation, sundown towns and lynchings. …
“J. Hartford Armstrong, as Ellen’s father was billed, and Lillie Belle had what they called a ‘Second Sight’ act: One of them, blindfolded, identified people and objects while fed information by the other via an elaborate verbal code system. Ellen did some mind-reading of her own in the show, and as she grew older she developed a ‘Chalk Talk’ routine in which cartoons she drew morphed into different images as she told a story.
“ ‘There were times when she would draw hats and then a rabbit coming out of it, and then she would elaborate on the rabbit, turn it upside down, and it’d be a picture of Abraham Lincoln,’ said Michael Claxton, a historian of magic and a professor of English at Harding University in Arkansas.
“Ellen Armstrong studied at the Haines Institute, in Augusta, Ga., and Barber-Scotia College, in Concord, N.C. After she graduated, she continued in the family business. When her father died of heart failure in 1939, she worked the circuit with her stepmother for three years or so. When her stepmother retired, Armstrong continued on her own, using dozens of props she had inherited from her father. But she continued to invoke her father’s name. …
“ ‘She did everything in honor of her father,’ said Nicole Cardoza, a magician who is making a documentary highlighting Armstrong and other Black female entertainers. …
“The places where she brought her act — churches and schools, mostly — were a refuge for African Americans and integral to Black culture, serving as public squares ‘that allow for joy, that allow for pleasure, that allow for restoration amidst the climate of injustice,’ said [Treva Lindsey, a professor at Ohio State University specializing in Black popular culture and African American women’s history]. …
” ‘Armstrong was fully aware of the inequities Black people faced, and as a Black woman she faced discrimination on two fronts. ‘We talk about Jim Crow often, but we don’t often talk about Jane Crow,’ Lindsey said, referencing the term coined by the activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray.
“The magician Kenrick Ice McDonald, in an interview, touched on the same point. ‘White women had to put up with chauvinism, yes, but they could still go in the front door of a theater,’ he said. He added, ‘To travel while Black can get you killed.’
“[Armstrong] continued to practice magic until about the 1970s. ‘She performed until she couldn’t perform anymore,’ Cardoza said. …
“Armstrong died on March 21, 1994, in a nursing home in Columbia, S.C. She was 88. … In January 2024, she was posthumously inducted into the Society of American Magician’s Hall of Fame. Today, a second documentary in which she figures prominently is also in the works, titled Going Fine Since 1889: The Magical Armstrongs, by the filmmaker Jennifer Stoy.”
More at the Times, here.
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