Trivia

She was the first female cab driver in New York City.

She acted into her 80s and retired from directing theater at the age of 98.

Member of the American Negro Theater, she played in many Broadway productions.

She is also known for being the first woman to work as a licensed taxi driver in New York City, which she began doing in 1942.

Despite being blacklisted during the Red Scare in the 1950s, she wrote five plays and founded the H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players in Harlem, New York, remaining active in mentoring African-American actors in New York City.

Salley Getrude Crawford Hadley, her mother, was a homemaker. Willis Lawrence Hadley, her father, taught on a Native American reservation near Spiro, Oklahoma.

In 1949, she was present at the Peekskill Riots, when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to lynch Paul Robeson. Her husband worked as a bodyguard for Robeson, and during the riot, she and her husband rushed to the motorcycles to help get Robeson out.

In 1935 she became the first woman to get a license to drive a motorcycle in New York City, and she joined her husband's motorcycle club in the early 1940s.

She was an American playwright and film and stage actress.

Using money she earned as a taxi driver, she enrolled in a speech class to help manage her stammer.

Her family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas during the Great Depression, and she enrolled at the segregated Dunbar High School.

Gertrude Jeannette had five brothers and one sister, and grew up on a farm.

In the 1960s and 1970s she appeared in Broadway productions such as The Long Dream, Nobody Loves an Albatross, The Amen Corner, The Skin of Our Teeth and Vieux Carré.

Her husband, Joe Jeannette, first proposed to her on her prom night, and she refused, "walking off the floor." They eloped to New York in 1933.

She appeared in films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1969, Shaft in 1971 and Black Girl in 1972.