That distinctive voice. That famous growl. Think for a moment about what you know about Eartha Kitt. Catwoman. The time she was engaged to Sammy Davis Jr.

Wait a second. What? Yes, long before the singer and actress worked with Davis on Anna Lucasta , they dated in 1954 — “before he lost his eye,” Kitt told Vintage Black Glamour author Nichelle Gainer in 2001. It was all over the black press. It was one of those details that gets lost over time as we condense historical figures to a few soundbites and montages.

Kitt is the cover image of Gainer’s new coffee table book, Vintage Black Glamour, which started as a Tumblr blog in 2011. It’s filled with obscure facts and photographs of America’s black glitterati dating from 1900 to 1980.

“It’s so important to remember these people who were trailblazers without even realising it,” said Eartha Kitt’s daughter, Kitt Shapiro. “I was pointing out to my children recently that when my mother did Catwoman, which was 1967 or 1968, even though she only did three episodes, there was sexual tension between her and Batman. That was a big deal, a woman of colour playing a villain in that type of role.”

Gainer’s blog quickly grew in popularity as people discovered rarely seen images of their favourite old Hollywood stars and discovered new acts for whom the curtain had long before descended.

You couldn’t find someone more well-suited for the work of cataloguing historic black celebrities. For starters, Gainer is related to one — her aunt, opera singer Margaret Tynes, who was the lead actress in Harry Belafonte’s Sing, Man, Sing! and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. And her unusual first name comes from the actress who played Star Trek’s original Uhura, Nichelle Nichols.

Gainer, a former editor for GQ , was a researcher/reporter for Us Weekly and InStyle magazines. When she became underemployed, like so many writers who started their careers in print media, she had more time to pore through archives of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

The worldly career of her aunt had always been the subject of family reunion banter, but Gainer never paid much attention. Tynes was off living the glamorous life in Italy with her husband; to Gainer, she was barely real.

“When I was a teenager, I cared about Prince and Michael Jackson,” she said. That changed in 2002 when Gainer stumbled across a photo of her aunt while she was doing research at the Schomburg Center for a historical novel. There was a photograph of Margaret Tynes having her hair done by Rose Morgan. (Morgan was a 1940s precursor to modern celebrity hairstylists like Derek J.)

Gainer could not believe her eyes. “I ran out of the library to call my cousin Miriam, the family historian,” she said. Later, she visited the Paley Center for Media and searched their archives. There was her aunt, performing on The Ed Sullivan Show. and Gainer knew there were probably others just like her: fabulous and forgotten.

Gainer deftly illustrates the racial politics that determined so much about their careers through her collection of carefully curated historic images of the black creative class.

“You hear about Josephine Baker, and you see a picture of her in a banana skirt, and that’s it,” Gainer said. “Or you hear about Eartha Kitt and you see her dressed as Catwoman. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I love all that, but there’s so much more to them. And when you don’t have a balanced, nuanced portrait of these people, they become stick figures.”

Gainer reminds you that before Maya Angelou became black America’s grandmother, she was a young, lithe, vibrant calypso dancer who performed in nightclubs. The same Angelou who delivered President Bill Clinton’s inaugural poem, an erudite embodiment of poise and reserve, used to dance in fitted bodysuits!

“It’s more inspirational to me to see the full person,” Gainer said. “Whenever I put up a picture of Dorothy Dandridge, people say, ‘She’s so beautiful, she’s so classy.’ Yes, she was. But she was also a hard worker, which is what everyone says about Beyoncé. Dorothy Dandridge had that work ethic. Imagine all the work that Beyoncé does, but it could be squashed by one person saying, ‘No, I’m not going to put out that record.’”

Gainer’s collection of images isn’t your grade-school Black History Month bulletin board. Vintage Black Glamour reminds you that these people had friends and confidants and lovers and charming idiosyncrasies, and that’s what Gainer wants you to see: humanity.

—By arrangement with the Washington Post