The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has recently acquired a collection of materials on Ethel Waters, a pioneering twentieth-century Black singer and actress. Born in 1896 as a result of the rape of her teenage Black mother Louise Anderson, Waters was raised in poverty by her grandmother in Philadelphia. Speaking of her difficult upbringing in her autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow (originally published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. in 1951), Waters stated, “I never was a child.” After leaving an abusive marriage she began in 1910 at the age of 13, Waters was ultimately offered
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