Written by Michael Claxton
Some fathers take their sons fishing. Others throw footballs with them in the yard, or work on old car engines, or go hiking in the mountains. My dad and I went to yard sales. Since my parents bought and sold antiques as a hobby, I had the pleasure of getting up early most Saturday mornings and hitting the garage sale circuit with dad. We were on the hunt for anything dusty that we could resell.
While some teenage guys are hooked on video games, rock bands or weightlifting, helpless nerd that I was, I was obsessed with sleight of hand. Which was weird because I was terrible at magic. The magician who came to my school made it look easy, but whenever I tried to shuffle cards, my hands shook, my heart raced and I broke into a cold sweat. So, I retired from the stage early and instead combined my parents’ hobby with mine. That’s when I started collecting vintage magic stuff.
One afternoon in 1986, my father and I stumbled into a bookstore in Atlanta and found a faded 1950s poster of Ellen Armstrong. I was 14 years old and had no idea that Ellen was a pioneering African American magician, or that she was part of a dynasty of Black performers from South Carolina. I just knew I had become obsessed with collecting magic memorabilia — a hobby my friends never understood — and I had to have that poster. I did not know it would start me on a 35-year journey of researching the family.
John Hartford Armstrong (1874-1939) was a Black man from Columbia, South Carolina, who started performing magic with his brother around the turn of the last century. Later he partnered with his first wife Ida, and as “The Celebrated Armstrongs,” they toured the East coast with a magic act, playing primarily to Black schools and churches. Unlike some African American magicians of the time, who adopted Hindu dress to disguise their ethnicity, the Armstrongs proudly proclaimed their race and never tried to hide it.
Two days after Christmas in 1904, Ida gave birth to a daughter and died soon after. But as soon as she was old enough, Ellen joined her father and her new stepmother as part of the act. The family performed throughout the South, bringing magic to audiences at reasonable admission prices. Their scrapbooks are full of letters from African American schools and churches, where audiences were delighted with their magic.
The family naturally faced prejudice in that era, as in the time that Armstrong was turned away from a performance because the white men who booked him did not realize he was Black until he arrived for the show. Ironically, the venue was at a Native-American reservation.
Armstrong died in 1939, and his daughter took over the business, with her stepmother still assisting. For three years, they toured the segregated South with a two-woman show — a fact which still blows my mind. I know of no other such show at the time. She continued in her father’s tradition, performing magic for the African American community to rave reviews.
She did a variety of tricks, like restoring a torn umbrella and pulling coins out of thin air. She also performed with a ventriloquist figure, made rag pictures (similar to the flannelgraphs once used in Sunday school) and created clever cartoons with chalk.
The show emphasized comedy, and her posters offered a half-price discount for “one- eyed people” and warned, “If laughing hurts you, stay at home.” In 1949 Ellen appeared in the December issue of Ebony, in a five-page spread on Black magicians. She married a real estate developer in the 1950s, working out of Spartanburg, SC. Like her father, she received hundreds of testimonials, all of which she pasted into her scrapbooks.
For years, Ellen was the only African American woman in the United States with a touring magic show. She performed regularly at several HBCUs, and her half-century career lasted until around 1970. She spent her final years in a Spartanburg nursing home, no longer able to communicate. When she moved out of her house, her scrapbooks were set on the curb. Fortunately, the person who bought the property rescued them from the rain.
Ellen Armstrong died in 1994 at the age of 88. I’m sorry I never met her.
When she took her own show out on the road in the Jim Crow South, her race and gender were against her. Few women were magicians, and even fewer Black women were. Ellen Armstrong’s remarkable courage earned her a place in the history of show business.
In 2022, I started sharing information with two filmmakers who are creating a documentary about the Armstrong family. I can’t wait to see it. Ellen’s story deserves to be told.
