[Impy]

An out-of-wedlock child, Eartha Kitt was born in the cotton fields of South Carolina, a pregnancy resulting from the rape by a white plantation owner of a sharecropper mother of African-American and Cherokee Native American descent. Given away by her mother, she arrived in Harlem at age nine, and at 15 she quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends' homes and in the subways.

Wow who knew.

[RedMonqey]

“...rape by a white plantation owner...” soumds more melodramatic than “a poor cotton farmer”

[Free Vulcan]

Very inspirational story.