Nick Stewart

The concept of “one for thee and one for me” is not limited to people like Steven Spielberg. As long as people have been getting paid for performing, it seems likely that there have been people doing some work for the money and some work for themselves. Certainly it’s an established fact in Hollywood dating back as long as “Hollywood” has been a concept, and not everyone doing it has been someone everyone has heard of. I think it’s especially true for people who are in some way limited in their options, because they need to do the work to have anything they themselves would enjoy available.

Nick Stewart started out as a dancer at places like the Cotton Club. He then branched out into singing and comedy. He developed a character called Nicodemus, and went as that a fair amount, or else Nick O’Demus. He branched out to film and radio. He was the one black actor in the deeply bizarre cartoon “Who Killed Cock Robin,” based on the folk song. (Yes, he played the blackbird.) And what with one thing and another, he poked around Hollywood, doing the kind of jobs available to black men in Hollywood in the ‘30s.

The two works for which he’s best known are, alas, The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show and Song of the South. He took the role of Lightnin’ after turning down the role of Calhoun the Lawyer. The TV show, on which he appeared, lasted about two years. He was open about taking the role for the money, and we’ll get to what he did with that money in a minute. Earlier, he had auditioned for the role of Br’er Bear, which he got. He would go on to be the only person to reprise their role for Splash Mountain, admittedly by the minor quirk of being the one still alive at the time.

So why Amos ‘n’ Andy? Because he didn’t want to play stereotypes. Does that sound contradictory? Sure. But how did you stop playing stereotypes? By starting your own theatre. And Stewart, with his wife, Edna, started the Ebony Showcase Theatre. Where he cast people of all backgrounds. Yes, Eartha Kitt and Nichelle Nichols, B.B. King and John Amos, but also Yuki Shimoda and William Schallert. It was clearly envisioned as a place where there were no stereotypes, just people. The money he earned playing stereotypes went toward trying to eliminate them.

And then the City of Los Angeles took his theatre by eminent domain and rebuilt it, named after someone else. Men like Stewart have been largely erased from history for playing the roles that were available to them. Stewart worked with the greats—everyone from Milton Berle to Dorothy Dandridge. And while you may or may not know his name, you know his voice. He liked playing Br’er Bear, and apparently Disney treated him like a king. Would that the City of Los Angeles had done the same.