Lou Swarz

In the mid-1930s, Swarz became a dean at Herman Dreer's Douglass University at its School of Expression based on theater and drama.[6] The same decade saw her begin her practice of skits and character acts in front of an audience, including drama monologues that involved using multiple different voices to play characters.[7] For these one-woman shows she performed as characterizations of figures such as Hattie Tyson from Zora Neal Hurston's novel Jonah's Gourd Vine, a French mademoiselle who falls for an American G.I. during World War I,[7] a gypsy fortune teller, Phillis Wheatley,[8] and Sojourner Truth. She was highly praised for her portrayal of Truth during her primary performance at the 1938 National Baptist Convention.[9] She also continued working in 1939 as a head English assistant in St. Louis for the Booker T. Washington Vocational Training School.[10]

While she had been doing her performances since 1933 in the Midwest and Southwest, her official debut in New York was not until July 1939 at The Town Hall.[10] From that point on, she became nationally known for her "One Woman Show" featuring monologue impressions of historic African Americans. Her shows garnered comparisons to the monologue work of Cornelia Otis Skinner.[10] The following months saw Swarz invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to perform at the summer White House and she took the opportunity to give two performances at the 1939 New York World's Fair.[11] Despite the sudden success of her show performances, Swarz had accrued debts over time and had to file for bankruptcy in February 1940.[12]

From 1942, Swarz began doing a series of shows for the United Service Organizations at various army camps throughout the country and bringing gifts for the soldiers.[13] This program was done in concert with Red Cross relief efforts.[14] Alongside her Zeta sorority, Swarz spent three to four days a month doing USO performance tours until the end of World War II.[15] She afterwards began doing a series of national tours in 1945, having added new monologues to her repertoire.[16] In addition to starring in films, she also became Director of Negro Publicity for Jack Goldberg's Herald Pictures in 1947 and obtained her own press secretary, Wanda Macy.[17] She further employed a personal assistant who was a fellow Zeta sorority member, Cecile Walker.[18]

Theodore Hubbard became Swarz's professional theatrical manager in the summer of 1947 and she later used her newspaper column to help reunite Hubbard with his long-estranged sister.[19] Swarz conducted another tour of shows across the Southern and Midwestern states in the final months of 1947, along with a stop in Hollywood,[20][21] and in North Carolina in early 1948, with her performances focusing on black colleges and universities throughout the states.[22]

Swarz became a columnist for The New York Age newspaper in 1945.[23] She reported on sports events, including the August 22, 1945, Jimmy Bivins vs Archie Moore boxing match.[24] This made her the first black woman to be a sports reporter for a national press chain.[25] She later started her own newspaper column named "Lou Swarz' Jottings";[19] after the column obtained an international audience she considered renaming it "Around The Globe",[26] before deciding to call it "Global Jotting(s)".[27]

Swarz held a School of Charm in St. Louis, and taught "Charm and Personality Development" classes in 1947 for the Sepia Hollywood Modeling Group.[28] She also acted as beauty consultant for Global News Syndicate through 1951,[29] before becoming associate editor for the company[30] and then associate director by 1955.[31] At the same time, she had an ongoing newspaper column called "Charm.." that covered beauty, fashion, and other tips on how to portray oneself.[32]

Before moving to New York for her theatre debut in 1939, Swarz had run a radio show in her home town of St. Louis.[33] In September 1952, Swarz was given her own daily radio show on the WWRL station in New York. Her show, The Homemakers Club, ran daily during the work week at 9 am, focusing on presenting recipes, beauty tips, general news, and different special features each day of the week involving community figures.[30] The immediate success of the show resulted in her being signed to a daytime radio program with the WHOM station before the end of September. This new program was expanded to broadcast from Monday through Saturday for an hour and a half in the afternoon. The first half hour had the same segments and specials as Swarz's WWRL program, but the following hour was entirely gospel music in a program titled the Gospel Songfest where Swarz acted as disc jockey.[33]