This is NOT William Dorsey Swann

Charles Gregory & Jack Brown (in drag) dancing the Cake-Walk in Paris
1903
Note: this is NOT William Dorsey Swann, despite what
most of the internet says...

Adventures in Book-Dealing. Gerard Koskovich, October 2021
A spectacular find today in the shop of a longtime dealer in vintage postcards:
A series of nine real-photo postcards showing the African American vaudeville
duo Gregory and Brown.

Jack Brown (1875–after 1920) and Charles Gregory (years of birth and death unknown)
caused a sensation when they introduced the cakewalk to the Paris stage in 1902 in the
show "Joyeux Nègres" at the Nouveau Cirque. The postcards were produced to promote
their Paris debut.

No photographer is credited for the studio shots of the pair. The publisher is noted in the
lower right corner of the recto as "S.I.P." Research remains to be done to identify further
details on the production and publication of these images.

All the postcards in the set I acquired were mailed to a single recipient, a certain
Mademoiselle Bourdier, on the boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris in March 1903.

Alas, none include a message (although in some ways, that's just as well, as the
message could only be written on the front of the postcard over the image itself at the
point when these were mailed).

NOTE: In January 2020, The Nation Magazine reproduced a postcard showing Jack Brown
without explanation to illustrate an article about African American drag pioneer William Dorsey Swann.

Brown’s image now routinely appears on social media identified as a photo of Swann. In fact, no photos
of Swann are known to exist — and he had no known connection with Brown.

I’m hoping we’ll see further research on Gregory and Brown, whose story merits recognition in its own right.

The REAL story of William Dorsey Brown