Emma Harris

Emma Richardovna Harris-Mizikina (Russian: Эмма Ричардовна Харрис-Мизикина; October 9, 1871 in Augusta — after 1940 in New York City; born Emma Elizabeth Matthews) was an American-born Russian actress, singer, dancer, cabaret artist, and writer. Early life Harris was born to a poor Negro family in the southern city of Augusta, along Georgia's Savannah River, on October 7, 1871. At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, her parents, Sarah Green and Richard Matthews, left the Phinizy plantation to seek a better life and opportunities in the city. Green worked as a washerwoman, scrubbing clothes for the local white families, while Matthews labored daily in one of the city's numerous cotton processing mills. After Harris was born, two more children followed (Thomas, in 1873, and Josephine, in 1880). By 1880, the family had settled in an old brick tenement on 319 Houston Street. Soon after, Harris began attending Edmund Asa Ware High School, the first public high school for African-Americans in Georgia. That summer, Harris was sent to Norfolk, Virginia to live with her widowed Aunt Hattie Matthews to continue her studies and later attend the Negro Mission College, which opened in 1883. But a few years later, her aunt died, leaving the young Harris stranded in Virginia with no place to go. Instead of returning home, in 1892, Harris made her way to New York and found work as a chambermaid. On December 23, 1896, Harris met and married local janitor Joseph B. Harris. The couple settled into a small apartment in Brooklyn, where they hoped to start a family. She also assisted in bringing several of her relatives up from the South. After the sudden death of their only child, Harris began focusing on her singing career. Due to her staunchly religious parents' disapproval of her career as an entertainer, Harris began singing in the Trinity Baptist Church Choir and working as a domestic close to five years. Louisiana Amazon Guards (1901–1904) Around April 3, 1901, while riding a trolley to work, Harris noticed that someone had left a copy of the New York Herald beside her. She saw an advertisement posted by German theatrical impresario Paula Kohn-Wöllner, seeking seven Negro women with the ability to sing and dance for a concert tour of Germany. Harris replied to the advert and was promptly accepted.