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Bert Williams (November 12, 1875 ? March 4, 1922) was the pre-eminent Black entertainer of his era and one of the most popular comedians for all audiences of his time. He was by far the best-selling black recording artist before 1920. Williams was a key figure in the development of African-American music. In an age when racial inequality and stereotyping were an accepted part of life, he became the first black American to take a lead role on the Broadway stage, and did much to push back racial barriers during his career. Fellow vaudevillian W.C. Fields, who appeared in productions with Williams, described him as "the funniest man I ever saw?and the saddest man I ever knew."   source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Williams

Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen (January 8, 1911)  born in Tampa, Florida, the daughter of a stevedore and a domestic worker. Although she was raised a Christian, she began to question the value of organized religion as a child. She gave up her study of nursing to become an actress and dancer in New York and achieved some measure of success. She won her nickname, "Butterfly," in the Butterfly Ballet sequence of Harlem Theater group's 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps as a tribute to her fluttering hands.
McQueen's stage and screen career tracks the way many blacks were treated in Hollywood and elsewhere in America from the 1920s through the 1950s. Few screen roles for black actresses were available and, when they were, the characters were invariably personifications of how racist white society saw Americans of African descent. McQueen's first film role was uncredited: she played Lulu, the cosmetics counter maid in the 1939 film The Women.  source:http://www.ronaldbrucemeyer.com/rants/0108almanac.htm

Mantan Moreland (Sep. 4, 1901) He was an African-American actor.
From Monroe, Louisiana, Moreland ran away to join the circus at age 12, had success for many years in vaudeville. Eventually his career came to Hollywood, where he appeared in hundreds of movies. Moreland?s artistry and face are familiar to most fans of classic Hollywood. ?Charlie Chan? TV fans know him as Birmingham Brown, chauffeur to the great detective in a number of pictures for the Monogram studio but those films are but a small portion of his creative output. Moreland?s wide-eyed portrayals of seemingly countless nervous manservant's and train conductors cause mixed reaction in these politically correct days of a new century. But whatever the response to Moreland?s film legacy in the twenty first century, the fact remains that Moreland was a very talented character actor with a great gift of comic timing. He was one of the movies' greatest clowns. Moreland's last appearance in a major film was in 1970's The Watermelon Man. Mantan Moreland died in Hollywood on September 28, 1973, at the age of 72.