Pearl Primus

Pearl Eileen Primus was born on the twenty-ninth of November 1919 at Port of Spain, Trinidad, the daughter of an Afro-Trinidadian-and-Ashanti-descended household of the Port of Spain Maraval district. The family migrated to New York in 1921 and Primus was raised in the West Indian Manhattan-Harlem community of the inter-war period.

She was placed at the Harlem Public Schools and at the Hunter College of the City University of New York, completing the bachelor’s in biology at Hunter in 1940. She applied to medical schools at the closing months of 1940 but was rejected by every American medical school of the period on the racial-segregation grounds.

She took employment in early 1941 at the New Dance Group at Manhattan — the principal post-Denishawn-and-pre-Martha-Graham left-wing modernist-dance studio of the period — as a kitchen-and-cleaning worker. She was discovered at the New Dance Group studio in late 1941 by the principal New Dance Group choreographer Helen Tamiris, who admitted her on full scholarship to the New Dance Group studio.

She trained at the New Dance Group from 1941 to 1943 under Tamiris and the principal teachers of the studio — Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey, Hadassah, and Sophie Maslow — and undertook in 1943 her first solo concert programme at the Ninety-Second Street Y in Manhattan on the fourteenth of February 1943. The programme included Strange Fruit on the Lewis Allan-Billie Holiday lynching poem — the principal Black-American concert-dance work of the period on the lynching question.

She was named on the strength of the Ninety-Second Street Y recital the principal solo dancer at the Café Society Downtown — the New York City interracial nightclub — and toured the principal American concert circuit from 1943 to 1947.

She was awarded in 1948 the Rosenwald Fellowship for the principal Black-American post-war anthropological-and-choreographic field research at West Africa — predominantly at the Liberian, Sierra Leonean, Gold Coast, Nigerian and Belgian Congo communities of the Africanist-traditional dance. The Primus 1948–1949 West Africa field research was the principal source of the post-war Primus choreographic-and-anthropological synthesis.

She took the master’s in anthropology at the New York University in 1959 and the doctorate in anthropology at the same institution in 1978 — the principal Black-American concert-dancer to take the academic doctorate in anthropology.

She choreographed across the following forty-five years the principal Primus-method concert-dance programme — at the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute at New York City and at the Manhattan Pearl Primus-Percival Borde Studio at the corner of Sixty-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue.

She served the United States Peace Corps in Liberia from 1962 to 1965 as the principal choreographic-and-anthropological advisor of the Liberian Ministry of Culture — the first African American Peace Corps choreographic-and-anthropological advisor.

She served the Hunter College Department of Anthropology as professor of anthropology from 1984 to 1989 and the Five Colleges Black Dance department from 1986 to 1994.

She died at New Rochelle, New York on the twenty-ninth of October 1994 of complications of diabetes, at seventy-four.

She is honored here as the principal Black-American Africanist-anthropological dancer.