- She was the first female cab driver in New York City.
- Member of the American Negro Theater, she played in many Broadway productions.
- She was an American playwright and film and stage actress.
- She is also known for being the first woman to work as a licensed taxi driver in New York City, which she began doing in 1942.
- Despite being blacklisted during the Red Scare in the 1950s, she wrote five plays and founded the H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players in Harlem, New York, remaining active in mentoring African-American actors in New York City.
- Salley Getrude Crawford Hadley, her mother, was a homemaker. Willis Lawrence Hadley, her father, taught on a Native American reservation near Spiro, Oklahoma.
- Using money she earned as a taxi driver, she enrolled in a speech class to help manage her stammer.
- Her family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas during the Great Depression, and she enrolled at the segregated Dunbar High School.
- In 1949, she was present at the Peekskill Riots, when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to lynch Paul Robeson. Her husband worked as a bodyguard for Robeson, and during the riot, she and her husband rushed to the motorcycles to help get Robeson out.
- Gertrude Jeannette had five brothers and one sister, and grew up on a farm.
- In the 1960s and 1970s she appeared in Broadway productions such as The Long Dream, Nobody Loves an Albatross, The Amen Corner, The Skin of Our Teeth and Vieux Carré.
- Her husband, Joe Jeannette, first proposed to her on her prom night, and she refused, "walking off the floor." They eloped to New York in 1933.
- She appeared in films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1969, Shaft in 1971 and Black Girl in 1972.
- In 1935 she became the first woman to get a license to drive a motorcycle in New York City, and she joined her husband's motorcycle club in the early 1940s.
- She acted into her 80s and retired from directing theater at the age of 98.
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