08/03/2022
First African American Female Magician. Feliz día Internacional de la Mujer!
Happy International Women's Day!
Ellen E. Armstrong has the distinction of being the first noted female magician of color. Her father was John Hartford Armstrong, who performed professionally as Professor J. Hartford Armstrong. Born in 1886, John’s father was a white slave holder and his mother was a slave. He performed magic across the South in the early 1900s.
Ellen joined the show when she was six, and before long became the mind reader in the show. She also showed off her artistic talent by doing chalk talks, which she kept in the show after she went solo. She went away to college, got her degree, and then rejoined the show. At the age of 25, her father died of a heart attack. She inherited his show, and decided to continue with it, billing herself as as “The Mistress of Modern Magic.”
Some of the effects she performed included The Birth of Roses,” “The Mysterious Jars of Egypt,” “The Flight of Figures,” “Miser’s Dream,” “The Puzzling Parasol,” “The Sand Frame” and “Hippity-Hop Rabbits.” She promised “250 laughs in 50 minutes Magic Show” which is an impressive rate of five laughs a minute. She also referred to the show as her “Modern, Marvelous, Matchless Merrymaking March Through Mysteryland.”
She married a minister in 1940, but continued to tour with the show. They had no children. She continued to perform into her mid 50s. When she died is not known, but she lived at least into her mid-70s. As is so often the case, women magicians, even those who broke through barriers, were poorly documented and poorly remembered.
She did get national recognition in a December 1949 issue of Ebony magazine. It had an article on outstanding black magicians, and she was featured along with Fetaque Sanders, Eugene Hellman and Moses Tiller.
