Ruby Berkley Goodwin

Ruby Berkley Goodwin (October 17, 1903 – May 31, 1961) was an American writer and actress.

Early life Ruby Berkley was born in Du Quoin, Illinois, the daughter of Braxton Berkley and Sophia Jane Holmes Berkley. Her father was a coal miner and union organizer. The family moved to California when Ruby was a teenager. She trained as a teacher at San Diego State Teachers' College. Later she attended Fullerton Junior College. In 1949, she earned a bachelor's degree studying "world peace and understanding" from San Gabriel College.

Her younger brother Thomas Lucius Berkley (1915–2001) became a noted attorney and newspaper publisher in Oakland, California.

Career Berkley taught in El Centro, California as a young woman. She was personal secretary and publicist to actress Hattie McDaniel from 1936 to 1951. She is said to have helped McDaniel write her 1940 Oscars acceptance speech. She worked for Ethel Waters in a similar capacity. With her syndicated column, "Hollywood in Bronze", Winesburg, Ohio, She wrote short sketches to accompany William Grant Still's Twelve Negro Spirituals (1937). Her poetry was collected in From My Kitchen Window (1942) and A Gold Star Mother Speaks (1944). She wrote a musical, American Rhapsody (1942), a series of radio scripts, and a collection of autobiographical essays, It's Good to Be Black (1953). She was the first Black author to win a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Hugh H. Smythe reviewed It's Good to Be Black in The Crisis harshly, concluding that it "makes no real contribution towards improving relations between the races". More recent assessments find the book to be a valuable record of black life in Southern Illinois mining country.

Personal life Ruby Berkley married mechanic Lee Goodwin in 1924. They had five children together. She died in Los Angeles in 1961, aged 57 years, from breast cancer. One of her sons, Robert Lee Goodwin, built a career in Hollywood as a screenwriter.