‘Red Stained: The Life of Hilda Simms’
—Cathy Ritchie
Red Stained: The Life of Hilda Simms
By Jokeda “Jojo” Bell (Minnesota Historical Society, 2024)
In the 1950s, a popular TV police/detective program signed off each episode with the words: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.”
As I read the fine new biography Red Stained, a variation of that catchphrase popped into my brain: “There were thousands of talented Black performers struggling for success in the 1950s. Hilda Simms was one of them.” Author Jokeda “JoJo” Bell has done readers a service by introducing us to a remarkable woman and artist.
Hilda Simms (1918-1994) never became a household name in her lifetime, a true loss for all her potential audiences. Thankfully, she is no longer a mystery, and her achievements on and off the stage are worthy of celebration. But hers was also a sorry tale of a great talent lost to mainstream America due to societal circumstances beyond her control.
She was born Hilda Moses in Minneapolis in 1918. Her original career plan was to teach, but financial difficulties forced her elsewhere; in the 1940s, Simms traveled to New York with theatrical dreams instead. There, she became affiliated with the American Negro Theater (ANT), which gave her strong behind-the-scenes training and introduced her to fellow actors who would later become Black trailblazers, including Canada Lee, Rosetta LeNoire, Earle Hyman, Alice Childress and many others. She also met and married one William Simms; the marriage was short-lived, but she retained his last name.
Simms brought several attributes to her new world. She was undeniably beautiful, with Creole-touched features, though she later became mired in the “dark- versus light-skinned” controversy among Blacks in the performing arts. She was also a keenly intelligent and involved citizen of the world. Her devotion to the cause of furthering Black actors’ success in all performance areas never wavered.
In 1943 as an ANT member, Simms debuted in the title role of Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta, the story of a woman striving to regain respectability after living as a prostitute. The production arrived on Broadway in 1944. By all accounts, it was Simms’s greatest acting triumph, inspiring praise throughout New York. The production itself made history, as it was the first play featuring African American actors exploring themes unrelated to race. Anna Lucasta became the hit of the season, with Hilda Simms on the cover of Life Magazine. (Unfortunately, Simms was bypassed for the play’s 1958 film version in favor of Eartha Kitt.)
Simms toured with the play for a time, sang in night clubs, and hoped for an eventual career in films. Hollywood should have immediately embraced Simms, but substantial roles failed to materialize. She finally appeared in a few medium-to-minor films in the early 1950s— perhaps most notably in 1953’s The Joe Louis Story, in which she portrayed his wife and, said some critics, saved the entire movie from disaster.
In 1954’s thriller Black Widow, Simms portrayed a hat check girl for a mere handful of minutes on screen, but even that brief appearance caught the favorable eyes of critics. (Both these films are available on YouTube.) While Simms hoped for meatier roles, her fledgling career would soon be permanently thrown off track.
In 1955, Simms was slated for a USO tour, but the Justice Department denied her a passport on the basis of her alleged, unproven involvement with the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. Though she strove to defend herself, the passport decision effectively “Red stained” Simms for the rest of her career, as she officially became one of the blacklisted multitudes.
She managed to stay afloat with stage performances in remote venues, short-lived television roles—and at one point, by producing and hosting her own New York-based radio show. Simms’s impressive intelligence and interest in areas far beyond stage and screen helped make the program popular. Eventually, she cemented her allegiance to higher education by earning a masters degree in teaching. She remained a committed social activist, always campaigning for better African-American representation on stage and screen .
Why did the hard-working, clearly talented Hilda Simms never become a major star? Was it the ongoing biases regarding Black actresses in general, and their on-screen skin color in particular? Was it lingering suspicion surrounding her political activities? Was she just, regrettably, born a generation too soon? Whatever the underlying cause, her absence from America’s artistic life was an indisputable loss. Hild Simms died of pancreatic cancer in 1994.
In a good way, I consider this a “no-frills” biography. Bell offers all the basic facts about Simms’s life, but keeps the story engrossing and (as a bonus) also provides an enlightening introduction to the mid-20th-century Black theatrical scene in America, emphasizing the American Negro Theater. That said, despite Bell’s title emphasis, I came away primarily with a sense of Simms’s identity more as an advocate for increased Black visibility in the arts rather than as a victim of unjust blacklisting. But no matter what the book’s various “takeaways” may be, Red Stained is a welcome contribution to the “stories” we all need to hear.
