Bill "Bojangles" Robinson

Luther Robinson was born on the twenty-fifth of May 1878 at Richmond, Virginia, the son of Maxwell Robinson — a machine shop worker — and Maria Robinson, a singer in the choir of one of Richmond's Black Baptist churches. Both parents died when he was an infant; he and his younger brother William were raised by his grandmother Bedilia Robinson, a formerly enslaved woman of the Richmond tobacco district. He took his brother's name at six in a household disagreement over the original Luther — to which his brother objected and his grandmother acceded — and was henceforth known as Bill Robinson. He had no formal schooling beyond intermittent attendance through age nine; he worked as a stable boy and a shoe-shine boy on the streets of Richmond from seven.

He left Richmond at twelve as a hoofer with a travelling minstrel show, served briefly with the Eighth U.S. Volunteer Infantry in the Spanish-American War as a rifleman, and from 1900 spent the following two decades on the segregated colored vaudeville circuit — the TOBA, "Theatre Owners Booking Association," sometimes rendered by the performers themselves as "Tough on Black Artists." He developed across the TOBA years the upright, exposed-arm, clean-feet technical style — moving from the bent-knee buck-and-wing tradition to a precise rhythmic articulation that would become the foundation of modern tap.

In 1928 — at fifty — he was the first Black solo headliner on the Keith-Albee-Orpheum white vaudeville circuit. He starred on Broadway in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928 — running for 518 performances at the Liberty Theatre — and in subsequent musical reviews through the 1930s.

He appeared in fourteen Hollywood films from 1930. His four pictures with Shirley Temple from 1935 to 1938 — beginning with The Little Colonel — paired him with the white child star on equal billing, the first time a Black actor had received such billing in a major Hollywood release. He earned an estimated three million dollars across his career, all of which he gave away.

He died of heart failure at New York on the twenty-fifth of November 1949, at seventy-one. The funeral procession through Harlem and Brooklyn drew an estimated five hundred thousand mourners. The City of New York and the Actors' Equity Association paid the funeral costs.

He is honored here as the master of American tap.