[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 22 (Thursday, February 26, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E252-E253]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               A TRIBUTE TO MS. BEULAH ``BEAH'' RICHARDS

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON

                             of mississippi

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, February 26, 2004

  Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, I would like to recognize 
an African American pioneer, actress Ms. Beulah ``Beah'' Richards.
  For the daughter of a Mississippi-born Baptist minister, a good 
education might have led to a secure job and a middle-class existence. 
For Beah Richards of Vicksburg, Mississippi, it meant freedom and 
rejection of life in a town in which she claimed to have suffered 
racism ``every day of my life''.
  In 1948, Richards graduated from Dillard University, New Orleans, and 
decided to pursue an acting career. Although she had her first paid 
acting job at age 36, Richards won three Emmy awards and was nominated 
for a Tony award and an Academy Award for her 1967 role in Guess Who's 
Coming to Dinner.
  Her career began at a time when roles for black actors were becoming 
marginally less stereotypical compared with the pre-war years, when 
comic characters or minor parts as spear carriers or domestic servants 
were the norm. Since she was solely an actress, not an entertainer, 
Richards never achieved star status, and specialized in feisty 
character roles, usually older than her years, notably indomitable 
matriarchs.
  A move to New York in the early 1950s, to play the role of the 
grandmother in Take a Giant Step, boosted her career. Take a Giant Step 
was a thoughtful drama about race that proliferated in the 1950's. 
Richards shined in the Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Raisin in the 
Sun, where she understudied the lead on Broadway and played in later 
productions.
  In the social thriller In the Heat of the Night (1967), she shared 
the screen with Sidney Poitier, Hollywood's leading black actor; later 
that year she did so again in Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to 
Dinner, this time playing Poitier's mother, despite being two years his 
junior. Poitier was to be the first of many screen sons. She later 
mothered James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope (1970), Danny Glover 
in And the Children Shall Weep (1984) and Eriq La Salle as the 
irascible Dr. Benton in ER.
  Aside from her acting career, Richards' life was an apex of activism 
and artistry. Her little known friendships with historical giants Paul 
Robeson, W.E.B DuBois and African-American communist leaders William 
and Louise Patterson helped cultivate her passion for using words to 
create wisdom.
  Reading her fiery poem A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, White 
Supremacy and Peace garnered the attention of the FBI under the J. 
Edgar Hoover administration. The agency's surveillance of her from 1951 
to 1972 yielded a 100-page file.
  She also had a brief stint as a journalist for New-York based Freedom 
Ways magazine covering the civil rights movement in Alabama in the 
1960s.
  Richards, who started smoking at age 17, had emphysema and returned 
to Vicksburg in 2000 to live with family. Richards died Sept. 14, 2000, 
10 days after receiving an Emmy award for a guest role on The Practice. 
It was her last role.

[[Page E253]]

  Beah Richards pioneered a trail for African Americans in the film 
community. She was one of the original foot soldiers in the fight for 
African Americans and women in film and for this she deserves 
recognition.

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