“Dat Lovin’ Rag,” courtesy of the University of Colorado Boulder Music Library.

June 19, 1947: Lottie Grady, one of the first African American actors to perform on Broadway, visits Los Angeles and is interviewed by the Sentinel.

Grady performed on Broadway in “Captain Rufus” (1907); “The Husband” (1907); “Mr. Lode of Koal” (1909); and “Three Plays for a Negro Theater (1917). She also appeared in “The Pullman Porter” (1912), credited as the first movie with a black cast and black director.

Long retired from the theater and now known as Mrs. Charles Roxborough, she told the Sentinel “there’s a new day a comin’ ” for black performers.

“It would have been impossible, in my day, to get the type of part that Negro actresses are being given now,” she said.

She declined to be photographed, telling the Sentinel that she preferred for people to remember her as she was. She died in Michigan in 1970.