Princess Mysteria

Last updated June 22, 2020

Princess Mysteria (stage name of Vauleda Hill Strodder, 1888 - March 14, 1930) was an African American mentalist, who wrote a regular column for The Chicago Defender .

Biography

Vauleda Hill was born in an American family in 1888 and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, but identifying her exact birthplace is made difficult by her insistence that she was born "at the foot of the Mahali Mountains in India, near Bombay."^[1]

The story as she told it is that she developed skills as a mentalist as a child and, by the age of six, was able to answer questions before they were asked. Impressed by her performance, the Rajah of Bengal made her a princess.^[1] Historians agree that this was just a legend created to promote her performances, and note that it was not uncommon for African American women claiming "occult" powers to advertise themselves as Indian.^[2]

With her parents, Vauleda moved from Kansas City to Chicago, where he married one Al C. Strodder. In the 1910s, she started performing as "Princess Mysteria," assisted by her husband, who went under the name "Prince Mysteria."^[1] She dressed as an Indian, with rich jewels and a headband. She also performed as a mentalist, calling herself a "human radio," on the waves of WJKS, a radio station in Gary, Indiana.^[2] Eventually, she emerged as one of the most applauded mentalists in the United States.^[1]

Mysteria also became famous for dispensing her wisdom weekly on her own column, called "Advice to the Wise and Otherwise," in the African American newspaper The Chicago Defender from 1920 to 1930. She died unexpectedly, after a short illness, on March 14, 1930, in Chicago. The Chicago Defender commented that, "from roughly 1917 until her death in 1930, no other female magician and few male magicians received as much coverage in the black press as she did."^[1]

Related Research Articles

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Over the course of a lifetime dedicated to combating prejudice and violence, and the fight for African American equality, especially that of women, Wells arguably became the most famous black woman in America.

Etta Moten Barnett was an American actress and contralto vocalist, who was identified with her signature role of "Bess" in Porgy and Bess. She created new roles for African-American women on stage and screen. After her performing career, Barnett was active in Chicago as a major philanthropist and civic activist, raising funds for and supporting cultural, social and church institutions.

Leon Giglio, better known by his stage name Leon Mandrake, was an Italian-Canadian magician, mentalist, illusionist, escapologist, ventriloquist and stunt performer known worldwide as Mandrake the Magician, albeit simultaneously and unrelatedly to the comic strip character Mandrake the Magician.

Mentalism performing art about mental or intuitive abilities

Mentalism is a performing art in which its practitioners, known as mentalists, appear to demonstrate highly developed mental or intuitive abilities. Performances may appear to include hypnosis, telepathy, clairvoyance, divination, precognition, psychokinesis, mediumship, mind control, memory feats, deduction, and rapid mathematics. Mentalists are sometimes categorized as psychic entertainers, although that category also contains non-mentalist performers such as psychic readers and bizarrists.

Katherine Mary Dunham was an African-American dancer, choreographer, author, educator, anthropologist, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in African-American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."

La Julia Rhea was an American operatic soprano.

Florence Mills, billed as the "Queen of Happiness", was an American cabaret singer, dancer, and comedian known for her effervescent stage presence, delicate voice, and winsome, wide-eyed beauty.

The bullet catch is a stage magic illusion in which a magician appears to catch a bullet fired directly at him or her ⁠— often in the mouth, sometimes in the hand or sometimes caught with other items such as a dinner plate. The bullet catch may also be referred to as the bullet trick, defying the bullets or occasionally the gun trick.

Saban's Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic is a 1995–1996 American magical girl cartoon show produced by Saban Entertainment that centered on the fictional adventures of Japanese real-life magician Princess Tenko, Mariko Itakura. After each episode, she would appear in a live-action segment to perform an illusion or do her "Teach-A-Trick," a segment that teaches the audience a simple magic trick they could perform at home. The show failed to attract an audience and production was cancelled after a single season.

L. Scott Caldwell is an American actress known for her role as Rose on Lost.

Joseph Dunninger, known as "The Amazing Dunninger", was one of the most famous and proficient mentalists of all time. He was one of the pioneer performers of magic on radio and television. A debunker of fraudulent mediums, Dunninger claimed to replicate through trickery all spiritualist phenomena.

Nora Douglas Holt was an American singer, composer and music critic, who was born in Kansas and was the first African American to receive a master's degree in the United States. She composed more than 200 works of music and was associated with the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the co-founder of the National Association of Negro Musicians. She died in 1974 in Los Angeles.

Roberta Dodd Crawford was an African-American lyric soprano and voice instructor who performed throughout the United States and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Roberta was born in Bonham, Texas before studying singing in Nashville, Chicago, and Paris. While in Paris, she married Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou of Dahomey. When Houénou died in a French prison, Roberta was left without access to their marriage funds and returned to Paris where she lived through the Nazi occupation from 1940 until 1944. After the war, she returned to Texas where she died in 1954 in Dallas.

The Chicago Defender is a Chicago-based online African-American newspaper. It was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott and was once considered the "most important" newspaper of its kind. Abbott's newspaper reported and campaigned against Jim Crow era violence and urged black people in the American South to come north in what became the Great Migration. Abbott worked out an informal distribution system with Pullman porters who surreptitiously took his paper by rail far beyond Chicago, especially to African American readers in the Southern United States. Under his nephew and chosen successor, John H. Sengstacke, the paper took on segregation, especially in the U.S. military, during World War II. Copies of the paper were passed along in communities, and it is estimated that at its most successful, each copy made its way into the hands of four out of five African-Americans.

Inez Yeargan Kaiser was an American educator, public relations expert, and entrepreneur. She was the first African-American woman to run a public relations company with national clients.

Sarah Rector was an African American member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, best known for being the "Richest Colored Girl in the world" or the "millionaire girl a member of the race".

Gerri Major African American women author

Gerri Major (1894–1984) was an African-American woman who lived in Harlem during a career that stretched from the 1920s through the 1970s. She was successful in a number of overlapping vocations including journalist, editor, newscaster, publicist, public health official, author, and community leader. An article celebrating her 80th birthday said "Gerri was definitely one of the 'new Negroes' of the early 20th Century" adding that by the end of the 1930s she had become "one of the best known black women in America."

Thelma Berlack Boozer American journalist

Thelma Edna Berlack Boozer was an American journalist, publicist, and city official in New York.

A. C. Harris Bilbrew was an American poet, musician, composer, playwright, clubwoman, and radio personality known as Madame A. C. Bilbrew. She lived in South Los Angeles. In 1923, she became the first black soloist to sing on a Los Angeles radio program. She also hosted the city's first African-American radio music program, The Gold Hour, in the early 1940s. The A. C. Bilbrew branch of the LA County Library in Willowbrook was named in her honor.

The Chicago Crusader, known from 1940 to the 1950s as The Crusader and from the 1950s to 1981 as The New Crusader, is a weekly African-American newspaper serving Chicago. It is one of two newspapers in the Crusader Newspaper Group, the other being the Gary Crusader.

References

1 2 3 4 5 "Princess Mysteria Pens Last 'Advice to The Wise'". The Chicago Defender. Chicago. March 22, 1930.
1 2 Curtis, IV, Edward E. (2002). Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. p. 57. ISBN 0-7914-5369-3.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[Defender-1] 1 2 3 4 5 "Princess Mysteria Pens Last 'Advice to The Wise'". The Chicago Defender. Chicago. March 22, 1930.

[Curtis-2] 1 2 Curtis, IV, Edward E. (2002). Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. p. 57. ISBN 0-7914-5369-3.