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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Tag Archives: Jane Charleston

Jane Charleston’s connection to the Harlem Renaissance

23 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Biography

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Calobe Jackson Jr., Dickinson College, Esther Popel Shaw, Harlem Renaissance, Jane Charleston, Miriam Phields, Oscar Charleston, Philander Athletic Club, University of Nebraska Press

Greetings, and apologies for the hiatus here. Everything, I am pleased to report, is proceeding apace with the Charleston bio, which, if I have not announced it before, is to be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019. I am on track to deliver the manuscript next spring, God willing, and had two occasions to present on Oscar this summer: first at the Midwestern History Association meeting in Grand Rapids, and next at the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference in Harrisburg.

Thanks to the offices of city historian Calobe Jackson Jr., the trip to Harrisburg provided me the delightful opportunity to meet Mrs. Elizabeth Overton, Jane Charleston’s great-niece. Mrs. Overton was extremely close to Janie, living with her for many years and caring for her at the end of her life. She is also the family historian, so Janie entrusted her with numerous documents, photos, and stories about the Blalock family. Not, alas, with all that many stories about Oscar–but some.

My interviews with Mrs. Overton and her daughter, Dr. Miriam Phields, have given me a much better handle on who Janie was, what she was like, what she believed, and how she lived. All utterly invaluable, of course. I am deeply in the debt of Mrs. Overton and Dr. Phields, and will doubtless be leaning on them more as this project advances. (They have been warned.)

Anyway, I took a lot of photos of photos while visiting Mrs. Overton, and I think this charmer may be my favorite.

Click on the photo, and you can see the basketball reads “Philander A.C., 11-14-15.” That’s Janie in the second row, second from the left, sitting next to this cheerful basketball team’s male coach (I assume that’s who he is). And in the front row, sitting in the middle, is Esther Popel, a good friend of Janie and her sisters. Who was Esther Popel? A Harrisburg girl and Dickinson College graduate who as Esther Popel Shaw went on to become a significant poet and author associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

That was the sort of impressive crowd Janie ran with. Oscar surely took pride in that. Maybe he even read Esther’s poetry, sometimes.

A little more on Oscar and Jane Charleston

18 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Biography

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Calobe Jackson, Jane Charleston, Oscar Charleston, Ted Knorr

Thanks to the help of Ted Knorr and the research of Harrisburg historian Calobe Jackson Jr., I now know a couple more important facts about Oscar Charleston and his second wife, Jane.

  1. They were married in November 1922–but not in Jane’s hometown of Harrisburg, as I had assumed. The first paragraph of a newspaper clipping in Oscar’s scrapbook reads as follows:

    Miss Jane B. Howard of Harrisburg, Pa., was quietly married to Oscar Charleston Thursday noon, at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Percy Richards, 3305 Lawton Ave. Rev. C. A. Williams, pastor of St. Paul A. M. E. Church, performed the ceremony.

    Calobe discovered that Rev. Williams pastored St. Paul’s in St. Louis, Missouri, and that the 3305 Lawton Ave. address is found there, as well. Percy Richards was living there and working as a bartender at the time of the 1920 census. My assumption is that Oscar became friends with Percy during the 1921 season, when he played for the St. Louis Stars.

    My guess is that the Charlestons eloped because Jane’s family–prominent and proper as it was–did not approve of her marriage to the ballplaying Oscar, which seems to have come within just a few months of their meeting. But why St. Louis rather than, say, Atlantic City or some other place nearer to Harrisburg? I have no idea.

  2. Oscar filed for divorce from Jane on or about July 24, 1941 (see clipping below, found by Calobe, from the July 25, 1941, Indianapolis Star). I do not yet know whether this divorce went through, but the Marion County Clerk’s Office will surely let me know shortly. If it did go through, that didn’t prevent Oscar from leaving Jane his estate when he died in October 1954.

indianapolis-star-072541-15-oc-files-for-divorce

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