Pearl Primus

Pearl Eileen Primus was born on the twenty-ninth of November 1919 at Port of Spain, Trinidad, and brought to New York at two. She took her biology degree at Hunter College in 1940 meaning to be a physician, and when discrimination barred her from laboratory work the National Youth Administration set her among dancers. In 1941 she auditioned at the New Dance Group and won its scholarship — the first Black student of that studio — her leaps already the stuff of legend.

Her debut came at the 92nd Street Y on the fourteenth of February 1943: African Ceremonial, Rock Daniel, Hard Time Blues, and Strange Fruit, the lynching poem made dance. Café Society Downtown engaged her that April; in October 1944 she carried Langston Hughes's The Negro Speaks of Rivers to a Broadway solo evening; the Show Boat revival of 1946 followed. In 1948 the Rosenwald Fund's last and largest fellowship — four thousand dollars, awarded in its closing year — sent her eighteen months through the Gold Coast, Angola, the Cameroons, Liberia, Senegal, and the Belgian Congo; at Ife in Nigeria they named her Omowale — the child who has returned home.

Fanga, the West African dance of welcome, entered her repertory in 1949 and never left the American stage. She married the dancer Percival Borde in 1954; their son Onwin was born the next year; she choreographed Mister Johnson on Broadway in 1956; and from 1959 to 1961 she directed the Konama Kende Performing Arts Centre in Liberia. Her master's in education came in 1959, and in 1978 New York University granted her the doctorate in anthropology — she danced part of the defense.

With Borde she founded the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute at New Rochelle in 1979, and she taught — New York University, Hunter, Howard, the Five Colleges. In 1991 she received the National Medal of Arts. She died at New Rochelle on the twenty-ninth of October 1994, of complications of diabetes, at seventy-four. Honored be Pearl Primus, who went to Africa a dancer and came home an ancestor's child.