Charles S. Gilpin

Portrait Courtesy of Meredith Carrington and Barry O'Keefe

CHARLES GILPIN CROSSING
St. James Street from Charity Street to Hill Street 

Charles Sidney Gilpin was born on November 20, 1878 in Jackson Ward to Peter Gilpin and Caroline White. He attended St. Frances School until 12 years old and apprenticed at the Richmond Planet until 1893 – before leaving Richmond, Virginia to join a minstrel and vaudeville show. In 1903, he joined the Canadian Jubilee Singers, which was patterned after the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Over the course of his career, he toured with the Red Cross, Candy Shop of America, Pan-American Octetts, Old Man’s Boy Company, and Anita Bush Players – with his most notable roles being Remus Boreland in The Black Politician, Jacob McCloskey in The Octoroon, Reverend William Curtis in Abraham Lincoln, and Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones on Broadway, which would be his final major role after a disagreement over the playwright’s refusal to remove a racial epithet from the script. He founded the Pekin Stock Company and was the first Black actor to be honored by the Drama League in 1920 – followed by the NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1921 and honors by President Warren G. Harding. He married three times before departing on May 6, 1930 and being buried in an unmarked grave in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York. In 1991, he was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.