A North Carolina Comedy Legend Finally Gets Her Due

Edith Darity sits in the library she helped build in the center of the community she’s spent her life preserving. 

Outside, a cold January rain darkens the windows. Inside, a framed charter on the wall proclaims Brevard’s acceptance into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1942. There’s a photo of Vice President Kamala Harris on display next to mannequins wearing kente cloth, along with children’s books about Martin Luther King Jr. and Aretha Franklin. 

“Makes you mighty proud,” says Darity, a board member and librarian at the Mary C. Jenkins Community and Cultural Center.

One hero missing from this list grew up just a few blocks away. A tiny plaque identifies the site where Jackie “Moms” Mabley, “well-known on stage, screen and television,” was raised. Until a few months ago, it was the city’s only public acknowledgement of the woman widely considered to be the first Black female stand-up comic.

During a career that spanned the 1920s to the ’70s, Mabley appeared in movies, on Broadway, and on The Ed Sullivan Show. She was the first woman to headline a solo act at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1934 and the first Black female comic to take the stage at Carnegie Hall in 1962. Wanda Sykes recently portrayed her on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

Onstage, Mabley skewered racism and sexism while playing the role of a toothless grandma in a floppy hat. “I don’t have no race,” she once told Jet magazine. “My grandfather was Irish and my great-grandmother was a full-blooded Indian. So what does that make me—a liar?”

Offstage, she wore men’s suits and dated women, blazing a trail for comedians such as Whoopi Goldberg and Sykes. “Moms opened a door for women to stand up and be funny, to talk about things as they saw them,” Goldberg said in her 2013 documentary about Mabley.

The absence of a larger memorial in Brevard might suggest that the predominantly white mountain town had forgotten Mabley, who died in 1975. But many people in the Black community never forgot—they just didn’t know how to address her controversial personal life. It took a new generation of leaders to overcome that hurdle.

“I’ve always respected who she was and what she was really doing in show business,” says Darity, 77, who is a cousin of Mabley’s. “I think it’s time that she gets recognition from the city where she was born.”

Last October, at the city’s request, state officials installed a North Carolina Highway Historical Marker about Mabley in downtown Brevard—as much a sign of her legacy as the country’s evolving understanding of racism, sexism, and sexuality, says Sarah FitzGerald, an assistant professor of history at Valdosta State University. 

“The missing piece of Moms Mabley, I do think, is the complicated time she had in North Carolina,” FitzGerald said, “and the complicated feelings the community has.”

From Brevard to Vaudeville

Mabley was born Loretta Mary Aiken around 1897. Her paternal grandmother, who had been enslaved, was a major influence on her life, according to FitzGerald’s dissertation on the late comic. Mabley alternately credited both her grandmother and her great-grandmother, a Cherokee woman named Harriet Smith, with encouraging her to leave Brevard. 

“There’s a world out there,” Mabley recalled Smith saying in a 1971 interview with the Asheville Citizen-Times. “I want you to go out in it … Put God in front, and go ahead.”

Mabley’s father, Jim Aiken, was a prominent businessman who ran a barbershop, café, and general store on Brevard’s Main Street, serving customers of all races. The family, which included 10 children, lived in a two-story house just outside of downtown. Her dad was also a volunteer firefighter, and when he was killed in the line of duty in 1909, Mabley’s life changed dramatically.

Aiken was so beloved that his funeral was held in the white Baptist church, with crowds of mourners spilling out onto the sidewalk. But after his death, Mabley’s mother struggled to keep the family afloat. Mabley was raped twice by the time she was 14, and became pregant both times. Historians are uncertain whether she gave the children up for adoption or left them in the care of another woman. It was during her second pregnancy that she took her great-grandmother’s advice and left Brevard. 

“I was going to Detroit to have an abortion and something told me not to,” she told the Citizen-Times. “I was in Buffalo, New York and I got down on my knees and asked God to open up a way for me to make me and this child a living. Suddenly a voice came to me, just like I’m talking to you, and it said, ‘Go on the stage.’” 

She started performing on the Black vaudeville circuit with the Washington, D.C.-based Theatre Owners Booking Association—dancing, singing, and cracking jokes. Her big break came when the vaudeville duo known as Butterbeans and Susie took her under their wing and introduced her to an agent. 

In 1923, she moved to New York City and began performing at places like the Cotton Club, where stars such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington appeared. According to FitzGerald, this is also when she adopted her stage name, borrowed from a boyfriend named Jack Mabley, because her brother was ashamed of her profession. 

“He told me I was a disgrace to the Aiken name because I went on the stage,” Mabley recalled. “They used to think that stage women wasn’t nothing but prostitutes.”

To get into character, Mabley hid her youth and beauty beneath a floppy hat and clown shoes, and removed her dentures to appear toothless. FitzGerald and other historians say this was a form of protection, allowing her to make subversive social commentary while appearing to be a “harmless and non-threatening” grandma. 

She earned the nickname “Moms” mentoring younger comics, and referring to audience members as her children. “Black women, white women, all of them. I’m color blind,” she said. “I don’t know the difference. I only know you’re a human being and you’re my children.” Some of comedy’s biggest stars, including Eddie Murphy and Joan Rivers, cite her as an inspiration. Whoopi Goldberg began her career performing a one-woman show about Mabley.

In her private life, Mabley had long-term relationships with women and routinely dressed as a man. “She walked off that stage, she was ‘Mr. Moms,’” said Norma Miller, a dancer who worked with Mabley, in the 2013 documentary. “We never called Moms a homosexual … That word never fit her.”

Mabley didn’t like to perform in the South, and she didn’t talk much about being from North Carolina. “It ain’t no disgrace to come from the South; it’s a disgrace to go back down there,” she joked on her 1964 album, Moms Wows. She spent most of her professional life in New York and Washington, D.C.

Still, she praised Brevard’s beauty. “I was coming up the mountain, coming into Asheville, and I couldn’t keep the tears back,” she said in her 1971 interview with the Citizen-Times. “Oh, Lord, what a beautiful place God picked out for me to be born in.”

She did come back to visit, driving a Rolls Royce and throwing candy to children, remembers Nan Whitmire, another cousin. Late in her career, some sources say Mabley earned $10,000 a week at the Apollo. Darity remembers Mabley using her wealth to help friends and relatives in Brevard repair their homes. “She loved people and shared with them,” Darity says. “She was a very giving person.” 

The summer Darity was 17, she traveled to Manhattan to visit her brother, who worked as an assistant manager to Mabley. One day, the comedian sent a limo to chauffeur them to her house in White Plains, in the same wealthy suburban enclave as Cab Calloway and Gordon Parks. “That was a treat for us,” Darity recalls. “Our eyes were big.”

By the 1960s and ‘70s, Mabley was reaching a wider audience, appearing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. She recorded more than 20 comedy albums in that era, including the 1961 gold record, The Funniest Woman in the World. Her act was sometimes overtly political, praising the civil rights marches and highlighting the daily fear that haunted Black people in the South. As she sang on her 1962 album, Young Men Sí, Old Men No: “I’m gonna vote and vote for whoever I please, and I thumb my nose at the Klan. And I double dare ’em to come out from behind them sheets and face me like a man.”

“There ain’t a damn thing they can do about it!” she added, pausing for effect. “‘Cause I ain’t goin’ down there no way.” The audience roared.

In 1969, Mabley released a cover of a song about the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy. In the emotional chorus, Mabley chokes back tears as she sings, “Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin Luther? Can you tell me where he’s gone?” 

At age 72, the song made her the oldest person to have a Billboard Top 40 hit—and she wasn’t done. In 1974, Mabley starred in the film Amazing Grace, playing an older woman who helps elect a Black mayor in Baltimore. In the final scene, her character speaks to a roomful of young people, advising them as Mabley had throughout her six-decade career. “I’m telling you to use those brains that God put in your head and go on out and turn this town upside down,” she said. Mabley suffered a heart attack during filming and died a year later.

‘It’s What Made Her’

Tyree Griffin grew up hearing his grandmother and aunts whisper about their cousin, the famous comedian. In 1997, on what would have been her 100th birthday, the city of Brevard renamed a street in Mabley’s honor. But after some residents protested having to change their addresses, the name change was quickly reversed. 

Griffin, 31, eventually did his own research on Mabley and realized she was “way ahead of her time.” As director of the Jenkins Center, his office is now down the hall from Darity’s library. A poster about Mabley hangs outside of his door. 

“She was getting paid,” he said. “She was very transparent” in confronting social issues like racism and sexism. Plus, “she was funny as shit.” 

Some older residents raised in the Black church were uncomfortable with Mabley’s sexuality, and reluctant to publicly honor her, Griffin and others told me. But that generation is no longer in charge. 

“A lot of the people who spoke out against it aren’t here anymore,” he said. He wants to break the misconception, which he’s heard people in Asheville express, that Brevard is just a small, racist town. “We want to highlight our important figures.”

In Tryon, about 40 miles east of Brevard, a group of prominent Black artists are raising money to restore Nina Simone’s childhood home. Griffin sees the efforts to honor Mabley as part of a larger trend across the country to celebrate overlooked heroes of color.

Former city councilman Maurice Jones, who is Black, led that charge in Brevard. After he was elected in 2011, he focused on reinvesting in the Rosenwald community, where both he and Mabley were raised. Thirteen percent of the city’s 7,800 residents are Black, and “for the longest [time], the community had been marginalized,” Jones says. 

He wanted to rebuild the community center—the original building closed in 2008 after falling into disrepair—and a nearby playground, and invest in affordable housing. 

But he also wanted to recognize the community’s accomplishments. In 2013, he worked with the local fire chief to have Mabley’s father’s name added to the Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Raleigh. He spent the next several years looking for the best way to honor the most famous comedian from Brevard.

In December 2019, Sykes appeared on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” playing Mabley at the Apollo. The next month, Jones suggested honoring the comedian with a Highway Historical Marker. “She was internationally known and well-liked for her talents,” he told me later, “and she was from right here in little ol’ Brevard.”

No one protested. Jones said residents were distracted by the onset of the pandemic. Assistant planning director Aaron Bland said the feeling was, “What took you so long?” He contacted officials at the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources about installing a marker, but the program was on hold due to budget constraints. Bland and a colleague did extensive research on Mabley’s career and submitted their application in October 2022. State and city officials gathered on October 20, 2023 for a ceremony to install the sign.

“Pioneer Black comedian, social and civil rights activist,” it reads. “Born Loretta Aiken, she grew up ⅕ mi. W.”

FitzGerald says this kind of marker helps local residents understand their place in the world. “This town of Brevard, this microcosm, it’s what made her,” the historian says. “She’s an important piece of American history, Black history, cultural history, women’s history, LGBT history—and that starts in Brevard.”

Local artist Stephen Rapp is also working on a larger-than-life-sized bronze statue of Mabley that he hopes to install outside the Jenkins center. As of last March, Rapp was still fundraising for the sculpture. (He didn’t respond to The Assembly’s requests for comment). Griffin would like to hold an annual comedy festival in Mabley’s honor, featuring comedians like Steve Martin and Sykes, but says that idea is still tentative as he works to find sponsors.

As Sykes said when she was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of Mabley: “I want to give Moms more credit and hopefully expose her to more people. They should know her.”

Darity sees the effort to honor Mabley as a continuation of her long quest to preserve the neighborhood’s history and remind the next generation about the heroes who came before. 

“Our story needs to be told,” she says. “Just because we come from a small town, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be a great person.”

Lisa Rab, whose work has appeared in The Washington Post Magazine and Politico Magazine, lives in western N.C. You can find more of her work at lisarab.substack.com.