📍Los Angeles, CA, USA
1921 – 1940“I was born in New Orleans in March 1917, and when I was four, my family moved to Los Angeles, hoping for a better life away from the harsh segregation of the South. My father was a tailor, and my mother a seamstress, and we lived in a city where opportunities for Black children were still very limited. I loved to dance from the start, and at about ten I began classes at a Catholic community centre, where my mother sewed costumes in exchange for my lessons, since the regular ballet schools would not take Black students. My parents worried that ballet would only bring me heartbreak, and urged me to study painting instead, and I did, winning a scholarship to art school. But I never stopped dancing. I found teachers who would take me: Carmelita Maracci, one of the few teachers who accepted Black students, and later Adolph Bolm and Mia Slavenska. At about fifteen, I auditioned for Léonide Massine of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo when the company came to Los Angeles. The other girls applauded when I finished, and Massine was impressed, but he told me that to join the company, I would have to paint my face white. I said no, and I sat on the steps and cried and cried. I decided I would make my own way. I danced with Katherine Dunham's company, and in the film Stormy Weather, and then performed my own solos in New York. In 1951 I became the first Black prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, dancing on its great stage in my own skin, and I later taught many young dancers.”
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