The Swans of Harlem
As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been fascinated by ballet and its history for most of my life. So when I began to see notices for a book about the forgotten Black ballerinas who danced for the Dance Theatre of Harlem I was eager to get my hands on it. It lived up to my hopes.
Karen Valby’s The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood and the Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History is more than simple dance history. As its subtitle openly declares, it about how Black women’s stories are doubly erased from history and about the efforts of a group of women “to write themselves back into history.”
The Swans of Harlem begins in 2015, when Misty Copeland became the first Black woman to be promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. Stories about her undoubted accomplishment ignored those of Black ballerinas before her. Five of those women formed the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, named after the home of the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) where they danced fifty years before Copeland,. Their goal was to bring their story back to light; they succeeded with the help of Karen Valby. The extent to which the book is a collaboration between dancers and author is demonstrated by the fact that there are two acknowledgement pages, one for Valby and one for the Swans.
It would have been easy to tell the history of DTH as the creation of one heroic (male) figure, its founder Arthur Mitchell, who was determined to make art in general and ballet in particular accessible to black children—an impulse born from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. And, indeed, Mitchell strides across the pages of the book just as he strode through the lives of the dancers who worked for him—brilliant, beautiful, imperious, obsessed, generous, difficult, and angry. But he is the background against which Valby shares the stories of five important dancers, the paths they took to DTH, their experiences as dancers, their lives after DTH, and the legacies they have created. Their names: Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton.
The Swans of Harlem is alternatively instructive, heartbreaking, and inspiring. It demonstrates how easily groups of women and people of color are removed from history in favor of stories of individual exceptionalism. Not just for ballet fans. Honest.
Shin-Kickers from History: The Griffin Sisters and Vaudeville
In the 1910s, Emma and Mabel Griffin were a well lnown vaudeville act. Performing as the Griffin Sisters, they combined comedy routines with music and dance numbers. (Mabel was the straight woman. Emma got the punchlines.)
They had started working as chorus girls in variety shows in the 1890s. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they were a recognized act on the white vaudeville circuit. They earned good money—sometimes as much as $200 a week.* (Though still not as much as comparable White performers.) But, like other Black performers of the period, Jim Crow laws meant their travel and booking arrangements were often difficult.
In the 1910s, they increasingly performed for Black audiences eager for entertainment. (Performing for Black audiences didn’t lessen the difficulties of traveling in the South.) It was a conscious business decision. They worked to expand Black vaudeville circuits, particularly into the South. In 1913, they founded their own theatrical agency, with the goal of getting Black performers the same terms as their white counterparts. They leased theaters in Chicago and Washington, as the first step in building the Griffin Sisters Vaudeville circuit.
Their plans came to naught. The physical stress of constant traveling caught up with them. In 1913, Emma collapsed on stage. She was hospitalized for more than a month. In 1915, Mabel suffered from a stroke. They continued to perform when they could, but their performances were intermittent. Occasionally one sister had to join forces with another performer when the other could not perform until 1918, when Emma died of bronchitis at the age of 44.
They set the stage, so to speak, for the Black female performers, and theater owners, who followed them.
* Roughly $6000 today.
Calling All Citizen Archivists
Depending on where you hang out online or what news media you listen to, you may have heard a call from the National Archives Catalog for volunteers with the “superpower” of reading cursive to join their Citizen Archivist program.* Almost thirty thousand new catalogers signed-up in the week after the call went out—100 times their normal weekly sign-ups according to the folks at the National Archives. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more.
Reading handwritten documents from the past can be a challenge.** Signing up to be a Citizen Archivist is simple. No application is required. Just go to the website and follow the instructions to get started.
One of the things I find most appealing about the program are the curated “missions”: sets of documents related to a particular topic that need to be transcribed. The service records of Civil War nurses, for instance.*** Revolutionary War pension files. Or more recently, documents related to the work of the Warren Commission in 1963 and 1964.
It sounds like a wonderful way to dip your toes into the intriguing world of the archives. Future historians will thank you.
*Some of you with sharp memories may feel like you heard this story before. Last year I shared information about a push to transcribe Clara Barton’s papers at the Library of Congress as part of the Library’s By the People public transcription project, By the People. This year, By the People is hosting a transcribe-a-thon dedicated to the writings of Frederick Douglass on February 14, the day on which he chose to celebrate his birth. (Like many enslaved and formerly enslaved people, he did not know the exact date.)
So many ways to help historians of the future work with materials from the past.
**For that matter, reading modern handwritten documents can be a challenge, as anyone who has received a handwritten letter from me can attest. I really try to write legibly, but soon I’m focusing on the idea rather than my handwriting and all is lost. There is a reason I type most of my letters these days.
***It will surprise no one that this particular mission caught my imagination.
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And speaking of the National Archives, I strongly recommend the organization’s blog: The Unwritten Record. A recent post tells the story of Matthew Henson, a Black explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on multiple expeditions to the Arctic. (Who knew? Not me!) Another is a round-up of links to materials in the archives related to the Six Triple Eight Postal Battalion, the subject of a new movie that I have not yet seen.