Camay Calloway Murphy, school principal and daughter of jazz musician Cab Calloway, dies

Camay Calloway Murphy, a school principal who was the daughter of jazz bandleader and singer Cab Calloway, died Nov. 13. The Havre de Grace resident was 97.

Her son, Christopher William Brooks, announced her death from "breast cancer and congestive heart failure" on his Facebook page.

Born in New York City, she was the daughter of Zelma Proctor and Cabell "Cab" Calloway III, who was then quickly establishing himself as a jazz entertainer.

In a 2021 interview with Baltimore Sun reporter Mike Klingaman , she said she was named for Camay soap, a beauty product introduced the year before she was born.

"My aunt Bernice named me," she said in 2021. "Camay was said to be 'the soap of beautiful women,' and she was hopeful that I would be beautiful."

She lived winters in New York City and spent her summers in Baltimore, where her father was raised.

"She met up with him on trips to New York, usually backstage in the smoke-filled theaters where Calloway performed for audiences that reveled in his effervescent act," the said.

"I remember being 8 or 9, at the Cotton Club, and going into the chorus girls' dressing room, where these beautiful women put lipstick on me and one of those feathered headdresses that they wore on stage," she said. "They even put a 'mole' under my eye, with a makeup pencil, to make me look glamorous and quite sexy."

She met the musical greats of the era, like Duke Ellington and singer and social activist Paul Robeson, who suggested to her that she teach in the South because, he said, "that's where you're needed; that's where you should go."

At the Paramount Theater in Manhattan, Mrs. Murphy went backstage to greet her dad and walked right by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, the celebrated tap dancer who'd starred in four films with Shirley Temple.

"My father said, 'Do you know who you just passed?' I said no — I was more interested in [Temple] at the time — but I did go back and speak to Bill. He was very charming," she said. "I asked if he could teach me a couple of dance steps, and he showed me the 'Choo Choo,' I think. But I didn't do well because I had on my galoshes."

After earning a degree at New York University, she taught briefly at a Virginia private school and in 1960 went to Nigeria as a boarding school headmistress.

After three years she returned and began work in the Arlington, Virginia, school system, initially as one of the first African American instructors at a mostly white institution. She became Ashlawn Elementary School principal in 1978.

In 1980 she married John Murphy III, publisher of The Baltimore Afro-American. At the ceremony, her father sang numbers from the opera "Porgy and Bess."

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She moved to Baltimore and lived in Ashburton. She was named to the Baltimore City School Board in 1994 and wrote a children's book, "Can a Coal Scuttle Fly?"

She later settled in Havre de Grace and remained active. She led an effort to erect a memorial statue for Negro League baseball player Ernest Burke at Tydings Park.

Survivors include her sons, Christopher William Brooks and Peter Brooks. Her husband died in 2010. She was formerly married to Booker T. Brooks.