She fought valiantly to perform wherever she cared to, and was the first Black performer in one of the coveted Miami Beach hotel venues.
The Ku Klux Klan burned an effigy of her outside the club, but she bravely went on anyway. At 28, Bryant retired from show business citing the damage the paint was doing to her hair and her disconnection with the church. Bryant walked away from earning as much as $3,500 per evening to enroll at Oakwood College, a Christian school in Huntsville, Alabama.
While there, she joined the civil rights movement of the time. Despite her talks with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Bryant couldn’t convince church leaders to involve themselves with the movement. She returned to performing in the 1960s, after further training at Howard University and landed a spot in the New City Opera.
Bryant toured internationally as an opera singer at the time and lbegan training vocalists herself in the 1980s. Some of her clients include Jennifer Holiday, the late Phyllis Hyman, and others. Byer’s documentary, “Joyce Bryant: The Lost Diva,” serves as the best account of Bryant’s life thus far.
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Little Known Black History Fact: Joyce Bryant was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
