Katherine Dunham

Katherine Mary Dunham was born on the twenty-second of June 1909 at Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and raised at Joliet after her mother's early death. From Joliet Junior College she reached the University of Chicago, taking her bachelor's degree in social anthropology in 1936 — she did graduate work toward a master's she chose never to finish, for the stage had equal claim on her; the doctorates that later crowded her name were honorary, and honestly earned another way.

A Rosenwald fellowship carried her through the Caribbean in 1935 and 1936 — Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and above all Haiti, where she was initiated into Vodou and bound for life. From her Ballet Nègre of 1930 and the Negro Dance Group school came the touring Dunham Company, and from the fieldwork came the Dunham Technique — Caribbean and African movement fused to ballet and modern, codified, and taught to this day. Broadway took her in Cabin in the Sky (1940), where she starred and shaped the dances alongside Balanchine; Hollywood followed with Stormy Weather (1943) and Casbah (1948).

The company crossed more than fifty countries on six continents, and she made the stages answer for the world offstage: she refused to perform for segregated houses, and her 1951 ballet Southland — a lynching danced in full view — cost her the State Department's favor and never her nerve. Her New York school of 1945 trained a generation: Eartha Kitt on scholarship, Arthur Mitchell, Chita Rivera, with Brando and James Dean at the barre besides.

In 1967 she gave herself to East St. Louis, founding the Performing Arts Training Center to put dance where the country had put nothing, and she stayed for decades. The Kennedy Center honored her in 1983. In 1992, at eighty-two, she refused food for forty-seven days over America's forced return of Haitian refugees, ending the strike only when Aristide himself asked her to live. She died at New York on the twenty-first of May 2006, at ninety-six. Honored be Katherine Dunham, who studied the sacred dances and then made her whole life one.