Europe (1930–1938)
By late-January 1930, McKinney had grown tired of MGM. She had begun failing to appear for promotional appearances, especially if her name was not in lights above the marquee. That spring, her new manager, Al Munro, sports writer of The Chicago Whip, arranged a tour of the Midwest for her. She was to appear in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. In late March, she left for Chicago to appear in a vaudeville show, Circus at the 35th Regiment Armory. The following month, she moved on to the Metropolitan Theatre for two weeks. During this tour, on April 9, McKinney appeared on two of Reverend A.W. Nix's Black Diamond Train to Hell sermons (Part 5 and 6), which was recorded at the Brunswick Recording Library. Horrible reviews followed McKinney, declaring her a money-hungry, star struck girl who had grown to despise her own race. McKinney claimed to have filed a libel suit during 1930 against a white reporter, Elisabeth Goldbeck, who stated that McKinney had "repudiated her race" in an article that composed for the Motion Picture Classic magazine.
In January 1934, jazz pianist Garland Wilson and McKinney departed for a tour of the Cote d'Azur, beginning in Nice, France, which ended up being a successful five-month project. The partnership enjoyed a success-filled month in Prague immediately afterwards. On March 2, she arrived in Budapest and appeared at the Parisian Grill-Bar for another month. She arrived in Athens, Greece, to open on April 7 at the Femina Cinema, where she was billed as the Black Garbo (prior to this, she had been referred to only as the Black Clara Bow).
Instead, on July 15, 1934, McKinney opened at London's Alhambra Theatre, where she remained for the next two weeks. In the meantime, she also appeared in Kentucky Minstrels (released in the United States as Life is Real), her first British film, alongside Scott & Whaley and Debroy Somers Orchestra.
During summer 1934, alongside Paul Robeson, McKinney began filming, Zoltan and Alexander Korda's Bosambo (later known as Sanders of the River) at the Denham Film Studios near London. The film, which was partly set in Africa, would portray African culture positively, which Robeson had made a condition of his participation in the project. McKinney and Robeson later discovered the film was re-edited without their knowledge, and that their roles in the film had been significantly downgraded.
