The title says it all: \u201cI\u2019ll Be Damned If \u2026\u201d Nothing was going to stop the ambitious\u00a0Carlean Gill, a young woman from Detroit\u2019s 8 Mile, from breaking out of her segregated 1950s neighborhood near the city\u2019s economic and racial dividing line with the white suburbs.<\/p>\n
Jubilee Theatre is premiering Cherie Williams\u2019 play about the legendary figure, who now lives in Dallas. The play was developed through Jubilee\u2019s New Works program.<\/p>\n
Gill joined Arthur Braggs\u2019 Idlewild Revue as a \u201cFiesta Doll\u201d showgirl at the Paradise Club in the Black resort community of Idlewild, Mich., in 1960. She performed through the early \u201970s, touring with the revue during the offseason on the Chitlin\u2019 Circuit.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll Be Damned If \u2026\u201d focuses on\u00a0Idlewild and the legacy of Black artists and entrepreneurs who found opportunity in the so-called \u201cBlack Eden\u201d or \u201cMotown before Motown.\u201d The club and tours showcased such artists as Stevie Wonder, Sammy Davis Jr., Etta James, Della Reese, Sarah Vaughan and B.B. King.<\/p>\n
Gill went on to study cosmetology and open a beauty academy and barber school in Saginaw, Mich., where she also became one of the first African-American horse breeders in the area, a business leader and a humanitarian who worked with the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina and Habitat for Humanity in Ghana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The title says it all: \u201cI\u2019ll Be Damned If \u2026\u201d Nothing was going to stop the ambitious\u00a0Carlean Gill,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465233,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[116,118,117,93542,88643,89866],"class_list":["post-465232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-tp-performing-arts","tag-tp-fort-worth","tag-tp-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}