Even without the golden lasso, tiara, and star-studded, red-white-and-blue strapless leotard, 6-foot-2 Tamara Dobson was the black Wonder Woman. On a mission to defeat a drug queenpin and decked out in Vogue-worthy fashions in 1973 flick Cleopatra Jones (pictured), Dobson kicked ass in high style, eclipsing all my other screen heroes. In “Black Sirens of the Silver Screen,” lecturer and author Joy Jones discusses this blaxploitation icon and a handful of femme fatales whose careers in golden-age Hollywood were short-lived, stereotypical, or tragic at best. Victims of the era, many talented early black film stars were in the right place at the wrong time. Nina Mae McKinney, a voluptuous actress and dancer who was dubbed the “Black Garbo” for her sultry screen presence, was one of the first leading ladies to travel this path of greatest resistance. She appeared in King Vidor’s Academy Award-nominated Hallelujah (1929) and with Paul Robeson in Sanders of the River (1935), but is practically unknown by most of today’s movie fans. Jones will also discuss Lena Horne, who started her long acting career in the late ’30s, and Ethel Waters, a vaudeville and radio star who began her pioneering efforts in Hollywood a decade earlier. At 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 24, at the Oxon Hill Library, 6200 Oxon Hill Road, Oxon Hill. Free. (301) 839-2400. (Nefretiti Makenta)