FINDING PAMELA NEWKIRK
FINDING PAMELA NEWKIRK
her father. The girls performed at the Apollo Theater and won its Amateur Night, stepping onto one of the most sacred stages in Black American entertainment.
At that moment, she was a child among legends. She watched James Brown, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five perform on the Apollo stage. The Baby Dolls shared an Apollo billboard with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, the Elgins, the Monitors and comedian Willie Tyler and Lester, his ventriloquist dummy.
But in the end, there were no commercial recordings contracts for the Baby Dolls. No records that would allow someone today to press play on a jukebox and hear them harmonize. For decades the group’ s existence was little more than a family memory.
Then an archivist found a page. It was a small page from a notebook kept by Bobby Schiffman, the Apollo’ s longtime owner and operator. On it, there they were: the Baby Dolls. A name written among those of the music legends who passed through the theater in August 1967.
It is easy to underestimate a piece of paper. But sometimes history survives in pieces: a name, a photograph, a newspaper clipping, a handwritten note, a voice remembered in the writings of someone who was there. Schiffman’ s notebook remembers the Baby Dolls.
There is something almost poetic about that. The little girl who would grow into a woman devoted to recovering forgotten histories had, herself, become part of a history that needed recovering.
But even in her childhood, there was more to Newkirk’ s life than music. She remembers being surrounded by Black literature as a child. Books opened up another world to her. Among the writers who shaped her imagination was Phillis Wheatley, the 18th-century Black poet who challenged the assumptions of the world around her simply by writing and publishing her verses.
For Newkirk, Wheatley represented more than an accomplishment in literary history. She represented possibility.“ Before her I only heard of Blacks during that era as slaves,” Newkirk told me.“ I didn’ t hear about( Black) achievers.”
For a young Black girl, Wheatley was evidence of what was possible. Evidence that a Black mind could travel beyond the limits imposed upon it. Evidence that a Black woman could leave something behind. Evidence that even in a world designed to deny her humanity, she could place words on a page that say: I made a difference.
Newkirk would spend her own life doing something not altogether different. Leaving evidence. And looking for it.
She also found inspiration in journalist Melba Tolliver, another Black woman whose career showed
BLACK WOMAN IN PARIS
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