Joe Rickard

Joseph C. Rickard was born on the third of May 1923 at Yazoo City, Mississippi, the son of a Black-Mississippi tenant-farming household of the closing years of the post-Plessy Mississippi Delta. The family migrated to Los Angeles in 1933 in the principal Black-Mississippi-to-California migration of the inter-war period.

He was placed at the Manual Arts High School at Los Angeles and at the Los Angeles City College — at the principal post-war Los Angeles community-college modernist-dance programme of the period.

He served the United States Army from 1942 to 1946 as a non-commissioned officer of the segregated 92nd Infantry Division at the Italian theatre of operations.

He returned to Los Angeles in 1946 and took the formal classical-ballet training at the Eugene Loring American Ballet Theatre Manhattan-and-Los-Angeles dance training school at Hollywood and the Adolph Bolm Ballet Russe Los Angeles studio at the closing months of 1946.

He founded in late 1946 the First Negro Classic Ballet at Los Angeles — the first all-Black-American classical-ballet company in the history of the United States. The Ballet was founded at the corner of Adams Boulevard and Western Avenue, Los Angeles, on the principal Black-Los-Angeles 1946 community-arts campus.

The First Negro Classic Ballet conducted its first Los Angeles concert programme at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre on the seventeenth of May 1947 — the first concert-stage all-Black-American classical-ballet programme in the United States. The programme included the Tchaikovsky Pas de Quatre, the principal Petipa Pas de Six, and the Rickard original Caribbean Ballet.

The First Negro Classic Ballet toured the principal West-Coast-and-Pacific-Northwest American venues across the closing years of the 1940s and the early 1950s — over thirty Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland concert programmes between 1947 and 1956.

He choreographed across the following ten years over forty original Black-American classical-ballet works for the First Negro Classic Ballet — predominantly the Africanist-and-Caribbean-and-modernist-dance synthesis of the post-war American West-Coast classical-ballet tradition.

The First Negro Classic Ballet was disbanded at Los Angeles in 1956 — twenty-two years before the Dance Theatre of Harlem (Mitchell, placed in this archive) was founded at Harlem.

Rickard moved to the Manhattan ballet-and-jazz-dance community in 1957 and taught at the Manhattan Karel Shook studio at the West Side of Manhattan from 1957 to 1962 — and at the Negro Theatre Ensemble at Manhattan from 1962 to 1980.

He died at Manhattan on the thirteenth of June 2000 of natural causes, at seventy-seven.

He is honored here as the founder of the First Negro Classic Ballet.