This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
When we think of magicians, we typically imagine someone sporting a top hat and tails while holding a rabbit alongside a sultry assistant. Often, this magician is a man, and usually he is white.
But in December 1949, an article in Ebony magazine showcased a dozen Black magicians as “among America’s oldest entertainers although few in number.” The sole woman among them was Ellen Armstrong, who was described as “probably the only Negro woman magician in the U.S. today.”
Armstrong began by practicing magic onstage with her father but later performed a solo act full of illusion and humor. One trick involved a blank pane of glass in a picture frame, where a cascade of sand fell from top to bottom when she turned it upside down. When the sand cleared, the frame held an image of someone famous, like the boxer Joe Louis.
In another routine, called “Miser’s Dream,” she made coins appear out of thin air and land with a miraculous clunk into a metal bucket.
Above all, her act was fun, full of “marvelous, mystifying magic, music and mirth,” as her advertising posters said, promising to “tickle your shoe string and make your big toe laugh” while cautioning that she “will not pay for doctor bills if you faint from laughter.”
Ellen Emma Armstrong was born on Dec. 27, 1905, in South Carolina to Ida (White) and John Hartford Armstrong. The Armstrongs were a magic-performing dynasty, believed to be the first to come from and focus on the Black community. Her father started performing with his brother when he was a teenager. Later, he performed with Ellen’s mother, who died soon after giving birth to Ellen, and then with his second wife, Lillie Belle.
Ellen was only 6 when she started performing with her father and stepmother, going by the name “Little Zelle,” as they traveled to Black schools and churches along the East Coast, from Key West, Fla., to Philadelphia. Their slogan was “Going fine since 1889.”
They performed during a time of legal segregation, sundown towns and lynchings.
“Black performers in the early 20th century, moving into the mid-20th century, had to navigate the nation constantly aware of that threat of violence,” Treva Lindsey, a professor at Ohio State University specializing in Black popular culture and African American women’s history, said in an interview.
J. Hartford Armstrong, as Ellen’s father was billed, and Lillie Belle had what they called a “Second Sight” act: One of them, blindfolded, identified people and objects as their partner fed them information via an elaborate verbal code system. Ellen did some mind-reading of her own in the show, and as she grew older she developed a “Chalk Talk” routine in which cartoons she drew morphed into different images as she told a story.
“There were times when she would draw hats and then a rabbit coming out of it, and then she would elaborate on the rabbit, turn it upside down, and it’d be a picture of Abraham Lincoln,” said Michael Claxton, a historian of magic and a professor of English at Harding University in Arkansas.
Ellen Armstrong studied at the Haines Institute, in Augusta, Ga., and Barber-Scotia College, in Concord, N.C. After she graduated, she continued in the family business. When her father died of heart failure in 1939, she worked the circuit with her stepmother for three years or so. When her stepmother retired, Armstrong continued on her own, using dozens of props she had inherited from her father.
But she continued to invoke her father’s name, advertising that she was “presenting magic as formerly performed by the original J. Hartford Armstrong.”
“She did everything in honor of her father,” said Nicole Cardoza, a magician who is making a documentary highlighting Armstrong and other Black female entertainers.
Armstrong worked hard at furthering her family’s reputation, and succeeded. After she performed in 1945 at Fayetteville State Teachers College in North Carolina, a historically Black institution, its president wrote in a letter, “I was interested to see if Miss Armstrong could alone keep the performance on the same high level of performances when there were three instead of one in the company.”
The letter went on, “She is keeping the name ‘Armstrong’ at the top of the list of the performers of magic and the dispensers of entertainment.”
The places where brought her act — churches and schools, mostly — were a refuge for African Americans and integral to Black culture, serving as public squares “that allow for joy, that allow for pleasure, that allow for restoration amidst the climate of injustice,” said Lindsey, the Ohio State professor.
Armstrong was fully aware of the inequities Black people faced, and as a Black woman she faced discrimination on two fronts. “We talk about Jim Crow often, but we don’t often talk about Jane Crow,” Lindsey said, referencing the term coined by the activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray.
The magician Kenrick Ice McDonald, in an interview, touched on the same point. “White women had to put up with chauvinism, yes, but they could still go in the front door of a theater,” he said, adding, “To travel while Black can get you killed.”
Late in life, Armstrong married Pierce Bowling, a real estate developer who was most likely a family friend.
She continued to practice magic until about the 1970s. “She performed until she couldn’t perform anymore,” Cardoza said. “We’re talking about not just somebody who was doing magic for 10 or 15 years, but somebody who dedicated their livelihood to this.”
Armstrong died on March 21, 1994, in a nursing home in Columbia, S.C. She was 88. She had become a stepmother to Bowling’s daughter, but her family’s magic legacy ended with her.
In January 2024, she was posthumously inducted into the Society of American Magician’s Hall of Fame.
Today, a second documentary in which she figures prominently is also in the works, titled “Going Fine Since 1889: The Magical Armstrongs,” by the actress and filmmaker Jennifer Stoy.
Both hers and Cardoza’s films will put Armstrong back in the spotlight, celebrating her as the only Black female magician who toured solo during the Jim Crow era, bringing joy and wonder to audiences at a time when violent repression was rampant.
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