On June 7, 1943, as World War II raged overseas, over 20,000 people gathered at Madison Square Garden for the second annual Negro Freedom Rally. Most of them came to be entertained, but they also had a sense of the event’s importance: a communal call to fight Hitler abroad and Jim Crow at home. The rallies, the brainchild of A. Philip Randolph, embodied the Double V Campaign, which had mobilized urban communities nationwide. They celebrated black participation in the war effort and called for racial and economic equality in the United States. With the outbreak of World War II, black Americans saw a particular irony in the continued existence of racial discrimination and segregation within the nation’s borders, even as black soldiers risked their lives in a war against fascism abroad.
During World War I, black leaders had called upon black Americans to support the war effort and had suspended vociferous protests against racial inequality. They hoped that by demonstrating their patriotism, they would convince whites to grant them full citizenship rights. Nowhere was this tactic more enthusiastically endorsed than in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous editorial in a 1918 issue of The Crisis, “Close Ranks,” in which he encouraged black Americans to forget “their special grievances and close our ranks . . . with our fellow white citizens” in the fight for democracy. But the tactic failed. Upon their return, black soldiers met with racist violence, sometimes while still in their uniforms. Jim Crow continued to thrive, and racial injustice had not lessened.1
In light of the unsuccessful approach taken during World War I, a new militancy animated black American politics at the dawn of World War II. Led by the black press, especially the Pittsburgh Courier, black Americans embraced the call for Double V: victory against fascism abroad and racial inequality at home. But not all black Americans threw their support behind the campaign. Some black Communists, following the Communist Party’s lead, rejected Double V as a distraction from the defeat of European fascism. At the other extreme, a small number of black Americans would reject any display of patriotism, believing the country to be incapable of fully accepting its black citizens. Nonetheless, the majority embraced the sentiments, if not the slogan, of Double V.
Double V would become a successful campaign both politically and economically, and its achievements, including those attained by the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), would translate into greater opportunities for black men and women. At each Freedom Rally, leaders showcased their successes. They crowned a “Miss Negro Victory Worker,” awarding her with a war bond and large bouquet of flowers—with this one gesture highlighting black patriotism and celebrating their victories. The FEPC now required all businesses with government contracts to have a nondiscrimination clause, for example—and many black women took advantage of these new opportunities. Large numbers of them left domestic service and farm labor for factory work. The majority of them held only the most menial janitorial positions, but a few worked as riveters and welders, and a number of them worked as sewing-machine operators.2
At the 1943 rally, the audience heard Adam Clayton Powell Jr. deliver a rousing speech. Powell, a beloved son of Harlem, was a dynamic city councilman and a candidate for the US House of Representatives. He had announced his bid for Congress at the 1942 rally, telling his audience, “And it is because of the new Negro that I must, regardless of the time and energy or previous commitments, run for the Congress of the United States, so that we may have a national voice speaking from the national capital. . . . It doesn’t matter what ticket or what party—my people demand a forthright, militant, anti–Uncle Tom congressman!”3 “The New Negro” was a phrase used by each postslavery generation of black Americans to distinguish themselves from their forebears. The best-known use of the term emerged from the Harlem Renaissance. Powell’s New Negroes were urban, politically empowered, and insistent upon their rights as citizens. They were no longer trying to prove their value or their worth to the white majority; instead, they were the avant-garde of American political culture, leading the way for their fellow citizens. Powell embodied the militancy and confidence that characterized a new generation of black Americans. He became the first black American to serve in Congress since the failure of Reconstruction. As pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church—one of black America’s most highly regarded pulpits—Harlem community leader, and New York City councilman, he directly confronted racist hiring and housing policies. He had proven himself to be both fearless and ambitious.
The multitalented Paul Robeson was also on the bill. His dignified performance of “Water Boy,” “Joe Hill,” and “Ol’ Man River” was a high point of the evening. Robeson had performed “Ol’ Man River,” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, in various productions of the musical Show Boat. He recorded it in 1928 and sang it so often that it became one of his signature tunes. The song expresses the resilience of black people in the face of their ongoing struggles. “Joe Hill” is a tribute to the labor activist of the same name who was executed in 1915. “Water Boy,” composed by Jacques Wolfe, is based on a traditional African-American prison work-song. All three songs were part of Robeson’s repertoire.
By 1943 Robeson was internationally known as an artist and activist. An accomplished athlete, singer, and actor, the intellectually gifted Robeson was also a fiercely articulate leftist critic of racism and fascism. Throughout the war he lent his talents to the Allied forces. Less than a decade following his appearance at the Freedom Rally, the US government successfully targeted him as a Communist, dismantled his reputation, and purposefully contributed to his mental and physical demise. But in 1943, Robeson was still a hero to generations of young Americans. Following Robeson, a young woman, dark brown in color—small, but muscular—appeared onstage. Turning slowly, dramatically, she wrapped her arms around her body. Twisting left, then right, she lunged forward gracefully. But it was the leap, a jump of almost five feet that sent her soaring high above the rafters, which elicited gasps of astonishment from the audience. Treading air, the dancer seemed to linger there, in flight. It was this leap for which she would be remembered.
The audience would have been familiar with modern dancer Katherine Dunham or tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, two of the most popular black dancers of the 1940s, but Pearl Primus, at twenty-four, was still relatively unknown. Readers of the New York Times or the Amsterdam News may have read about this young woman, this incredible emerging artist. By the time she performed at future Freedom Rallies in 1944 and 1945, she was a star. But on this afternoon in 1943, she sat at the precipice of an extraordinary career.
Primus danced to two recordings by Josh White, “Hard Time Blues” and “Jim Crow Train.” “Hard Times Blues” is a song about black sharecroppers and their dispossession. In “Jim Crow Train,” by Waring Cuney, White’s guitar emulates the sound of a train in motion to lyrics expressing longing for the end of Jim Crow. Both were dances of social protest. With “Jim Crow Train,” Primus carried her audience’s frustrations and aspirations within her body. She danced the confining, stifling nature of segregation and then she leapt high above the bleachers, right out of the imagined train. It was a leap of frustration, anger, and protest. When finally she flew, she took her audience with her. Through physical movement, she sought to inspire social and political movement. Years later, in 1978, writing in her PhD dissertation about community responses to great dancers in traditional West African societies, she may well have been describing herself: “When these people truly dance, there can be no observers. . . . [The observers] are snatched, plucked up by an invisible force and hurled into the ring of the dance, their own heartbeat matching the crescendo of pulsing sound, their bodies becoming one with the sweating dancers.”4
In his Chicago Defender column, the revered poet Langston Hughes wrote: “Every time she leaped, folks felt like shouting. Some did. Some hollered out loud.”5
On this night Primus began to live out her calling: to use the language of dance to represent the dignity and strength of black people and to express their longing for freedom. Primus saw dance as a means of contributing to the ongoing struggle for social justice. The politically conscious young dancer had learned that the dancer’s movement has the power to transform the observer’s consciousness. This was a central component of the aesthetic that informed her practice—a component she inherited from a tradition of vernacular dance born of Africa, and one that was also central to modern dance itself. In fact, the great modern dance critic and Primus champion John Martin insisted that “movement . . . in and of itself is a medium for the transference of an aesthetic and emotional concept from the consciousness of one individual to that of another.”6
Modern dance had been ensconced in radical politics since its formation; traditional African dance sought to give expression to the community’s history and aspirations. In creating a dialogue between these two forms, Primus helped to introduce a new context for the marriage of black aesthetics and politics. For Primus, traditional African dance and contemporary black vernacular dance were more than mere inspirations for modernist choreography; they were equal participants in helping to create a modern dance vocabulary.
Dance provided a new medium for the expression of protest against segregation, and it was a particularly effective challenge, in that dance is not bound by one or two dimensions. The dancer can move across planes of space; she can lie flat on the ground, writhing. She can stand flatfooted, twisting her body, arms wrapped around her torso and then flung outward toward her audience, before reaching up. And she can defy gravity, leave the ground, shoot into the air, into space. Primus’s leaps were not those of a ballet dancer. Her body in the air looked like an abstract sculpture, exhibiting both strength and beauty. Her joints bent to create ninety-degree angles: the right knee might bend, the calf forming a line underneath her torso, while her left leg stretched out, ending in a pointed toe, arms parallel to her legs. Her leaps were not only meant to demonstrate grace but also to celebrate strength. However, they were not mere demonstrations of athleticism; they were fundamental to her choreography. They marked rhythm, moved her across the stage, and shot her up above it.
Pearl Primus in Folk Dance (1945). Photo by Gerda Peterich.
Through dance, Primus was able to portray the challenges and restrictions of segregation, and in her performance of “Jim Crow Train,” she limned the walls of the Jim Crow car, made palpable its confining nature, and then resisted its constraints by leaping out of it, by flying rather than riding. In these choreographed gestures she embodied a particularly black paradox: forced confinement and forced mobility. While the major experience of black diasporic communities has been one of mobility, migration, and dislocation, these populations have also experienced forced confinement in various forms of segregation, imprisonment, and enslavement. Black activists and writers had been resisting segregated transportation since its institutionalization in 1893. In fact, for writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt, the Jim Crow car had become a major signifier of black people’s second-class status. And both Ida B. Wells and Homer Plessy filed suits against segregated seating on public trolley cars to contest this second-class status. The blatant indignities of the Jim Crow car gave African Americans an opportunity to raise questions of class differences between black and white Americans, to challenge the social construction of race, and to question the ethics of white men who used the car to smoke, curse, and harass black women. For black women activists, the Jim Crow car was the impetus behind their challenge to race-based definitions of the term “lady.” On some segregated cars, black women were forced from the “Ladies Car” to the “Smoker’s Car” or the “Colored Car.” Black women were excluded from the category “lady,” and thus from the protections afforded by that term.7
At the time of her appearance at the Freedom Rally, Primus had never been on a Jim Crow car. She had been born in the Caribbean and had migrated to New York as a toddler, so she had missed the worst of southern racism. But much of her audience and many of her neighbors were migrants from the South and had experienced Jim Crow cars and other types of segregation firsthand. Between 1916 and 1930, approximately 1.5 million African Americans moved to northern cities in response to the call for wartime labor. This mass movement was known as the Great Migration. The Second Great Migration was longer and more sustained than the first. Between 1940 and 1970, over 5 million black southerners migrated north and west.
During this period, black Americans became an urban people. Large numbers of black migrants who now populated northern cities and lived in communities like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant attended events such as the Freedom Rally. They brought with them firsthand knowledge of the indignities of racial segregation. Although black migrants had escaped the most persistent and virulent forms of racism, they carried their experiences with them when they left the South. Those experiences shaped their sense of history, culture, tradition, and family. For many, the South was the site of struggle, the primary but not the only battleground in the war against white supremacy. The North, they soon learned, was yet another battleground, and there they experienced a subtler and more insidious form of racism. There were no “Whites Only” signs in New York, but black migrants were racially segregated by neighborhood, and there were many establishments where they were not welcome. The existence of racial segregation struck many as a mockery of American ideals of democracy. They were joined by a growing number of white Americans who also believed the time had come to end Jim Crow. Many of them had also experienced segregated transportation: they rode in the “Whites Only” car.
As black and white Americans in cities like New York were confronted again and again with the failures of American democracy, they began to become more politically active. As a young dancer in New York, Primus tapped into that activism, creating pieces inspired by the black struggle in the United States. But she was also creating a repertoire based on African and Caribbean dance. As such, she constructed a vision of the African diaspora, one that was enabled not only by her own background but also by New York City. The city was an aspiring dancer’s dream. There, Primus had access to folk and modern dance classes, to venues for social dance, such as Harlem’s famous Savoy Ballroom, and to performances by dancers as diverse as Martha Graham and Asadata Dafora. In fact, she would dance with both of these pioneers. A native of Sierra Leone, Dafora—drummer, singer, and dancer—introduced African drumming and dance to the United States in the early 1930s. His 1934 performance of Kykunkor brought West African music and dance to the American concert stage. Martha Graham is one of the foremothers of modern dance in America, credited with having invented an entirely new movement vocabulary.
Primus was also exposed to a dance aesthetic that connected modern dance to social protest. Speaking about her preparation for the Negro Freedom Rally, she told the Daily Worker: “I know we must all do our part in this war to beat Fascism and I consider the battle against Jim Crow in America part of that fight, which is taking place on the battlefronts of the world.” In this broad battle, Primus believed her dancing could serve as a tool to help dismantle these evils. She continued, “Each one of us can wield a weapon against Jim Crow and Fascism and my special one is dancing. I shall continue to protest Jim Crow through my dancing until Victory is won.” Primus’s statement demonstrates her grounding in Double V discourse linking fascism abroad with Jim Crow at home. According to Double V, both Nazism and Jim Crow were animated by white supremacist ideology and maintained by law and violence.8
The Popular Front aesthetic would also have a profound influence on the young dancer. The Popular Front, the coalition of liberals and leftists who opposed fascism, and the modern dance companies it inspired insisted that art, including dance, could be a weapon in the struggle for social justice. In the 1940s, Primus believed the arts were a tool in the struggle. Later, she recalled that “in the forties you could protest[;] in fact, I was most encouraged.” She was not alone—Katherine Dunham and Talley Beatty also choreographed dances of social protest—but she was unique. Primus combined athleticism and grace, intellect and political passion, and had a devotion to the African past and present as well as a thorough engagement with the modernist aesthetic. She was less interested in commercial or popular success than Dunham and Beatty were; she was an intellectual first and foremost. For Primus, dance was as much a medium of teaching and consciousness raising as it was a form of entertainment—if not more so.9
Primus was not only engaged in a leftist political and artistic community, however; she was also part of a group of New York–based artists who wished to bring the culture of Africa and peoples of African descent to the attention of white audiences. Instead of evolving from a leftist to a black nationalist, instead of transitioning from an artist interested in social realism and modern dance to one interested in what would later be called “Afrocentricity,” Primus always merged these political stances and aesthetic commitments. She did so by situating African dance alongside modern dance, and in so doing creating a dialogue between the two forms, showing them both to be representations of a longing for freedom and human dignity. In this way she was not different from a number of her politically engaged contemporaries. Long before her first trip to Africa in 1948, Primus was as interested in the history and culture of the continent as she was in the innovations of modern dance. In fact, her awareness of and interest in Africa preceded any formal dance training.10
When Primus told her own story, she almost always started with her Ashanti grandfather, who was a “voodoo” drummer in Trinidad, and with the masked, dancing figure of Carnival. She rooted her own artistry in her African and Caribbean roots. Her grandfather, “Lassido” Jackson, traced his lineage to an Ashanti king. According to Primus, “he lived the life of a traditional person.” She later said, “My home was an African home.”11 Outside her childhood home, she recalled as an adult, one could experience Harlem or Brooklyn, but inside, it was always the Caribbean and Africa. As in the homes of many black people, dance was not something to be performed onstage, but something done in the home and in the ballroom. At times she claimed her mother excelled as a graceful and gifted dancer. The dances at home or in the ballroom were an amalgamation of Africa, the Caribbean, the American South, and the black North. When Primus began her formal training and then her professional career, she sought to dance Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South as she imagined them and reconstructed them from her own research. She danced this geography before she traveled it.
As a Caribbean immigrant to New York, Primus inherited a legacy that combined political radicalism, pride in African ancestry, and a belief in the opportunities available to her in her new home. She was one of the 40,000 Caribbean immigrants who came to New York and Harlem between 1900 and 1930. They were central to the development of Harlem’s political and artistic culture during this time. Primus inherited not only a sense of culture from her Caribbean roots, but also a very strong black nationalist worldview. Her father and uncle constantly talked of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and his Back-to-Africa movement. She was aware of herself as an African in the West, part of a people who had contributed much to the development of the Americas, and part of a generation that would help to defeat fascism.12
Pearl Eileen Primus was born in Woodstock, Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1919. In 1921 she and her mother joined her father in New York, part of a wave of Caribbean immigrants who settled in the city. Between 1913 and 1924, the peak years of Caribbean migration to the United States, large numbers of migrants settled in Manhattan and Brooklyn. By 1930, Caribbean immigrants made up a quarter of black Harlem’s population. In New York, Primus, her parents, and her two brothers, Edward Jr. and Carl, first lived on 69th and Broadway, an area near what is now Lincoln Center. The neighborhood was home to a number of West Indian and African American families, including that of a budding young pianist named Thelonious Monk. Later, the Primuses moved to 110 East 97th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues in East Harlem. Although the area housed a number of black families, it would soon be best known for its Puerto Rican inhabitants. Even in the thirties, this part of Harlem was more ethnically and racially diverse than its better-known western side. Eventually, the Primus family would move to another Caribbean stronghold in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant.13
Like many other Caribbean immigrants of this first major wave, the Primus family put a high premium on education and professional achievement. Therefore it is not surprising that Pearl attended one of the city’s most competitive high schools, Hunter College High School. Founded to teach intellectually gifted girls, Hunter College High School was established as a private girls’ school in 1896. It eventually became a selective magnet public school, but it was not operated by the New York City Department of Education; instead, it was administered by Hunter College. Primus was one of the few black students to attend. After graduating from Hunter College High School, Primus enrolled at Hunter College, where she was a pre-med and biology major. The college was open to all qualified young women regardless of religion or ethnicity, and it maintained a reputation for a rigorous program of academic study.
Although she aspired to be a doctor, Primus had a broad range of interests as a student. She was an Olympic-caliber track-and-field star who excelled at the broad jump; she minored in physical education and took classes in dancing, apparatus, fencing, basketball, tennis, and possibly swimming (“if I can get it,” she wrote in her journal before registration). Even as early as 1937, she wrote, “I’d love to specialize in the dancing but it is not stressed more than the others.”14 That she majored in biology and excelled at sports would not be insignificant. She understood, both intellectually and experientially, the mechanics of the body. But although she was an avid athlete and dancer, at this time in her life Primus seemed destined to be a scientist.
Still, her letters and journal entries from this period reveal a sensitive, thoughtful, intellectually curious young woman devoted to her family, her studies, and her friends. She possessed a poetic nature and a love of the natural world and the changing seasons. A well-rounded reader, she was also ambitious, hoping to earn a PhD in biology and eventually to become a surgeon. As Hunter was a commuter school, Primus lived at home with her close-knit family. In one journal entry from that time, she described her chaotic room as she studied for finals: “All my biological instruments, frogs, skeletons, butterflies, glass jars, stirring rod, mixing bowls, hard lens, all my drawing apparatus, chalks and rags; all my school notes . . . my books are now arranged under the bed.”15
The young Primus also took full advantage of New York, catching shows and visiting museums. In another journal entry she noted her excitement that Richard II was scheduled to reopen soon and said that she “would also like to hike thru Tibbetts Brook Park. I want to see the Frick Collection too.”16 Tibbetts Brook Park, which opened in 1927, is a large park located in Yonkers, only a few miles north of Manhattan, and it provided nature-loving New Yorkers like Primus with the opportunity to hike and fish. On the opposite end of this bucolic setting, the Frick Collection, located on 70th Street between Madison and Fifth, housed major works of art by European artists. So the young woman who had been born in Trinidad became a true New Yorker as she explored the full range of what her city had to offer. She also went to the Savoy in Harlem, where she danced all the popular social dances and especially enjoyed the Lindy Hop. Perhaps she used her athletic skills as she leapt, keeping time with the music, soaring with, if not above, the other dancers. She even may have danced in a crowd that included Malcolm Little, later to become Malcolm X.
After graduating from Hunter College in 1940, Primus sought out work as a lab technician in order to earn money to attend Howard Medical School. However, because of racism, none of the labs to which she applied would hire her, despite her qualifications, and she was forced to take various clerical and menial jobs. She worked as a cherry picker, a riveter, a switchboard operator, a welder for Todd Shipyards in Hoboken, and a clerical worker at the National Maritime Workers Union.17 Primus was one of a growing number of women who found work in the war industry, which was up and running as the famed “arsenal of democracy” as early as 1940. Women in New York could be found operating elevators, driving trucks and taxis, and “riveting, welding, and working the assembly line in war plants and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.” For the most part, black women still met with difficulty when they sought skilled labor or clerical work, which is why Primus could rarely find anything but unskilled jobs. Although Executive Order 8802, signed by President Roosevelt in June 1941, banned race discrimination in the defense industry, it was rarely enforced. Very few black women were as successful as Primus was in acquiring employment as welders or riveters.18
In 1941, Primus refocused her attention on her education and finally began to find work more suited to her interests. She began to pursue graduate classes in health education at New York University before transferring to a master’s program in psychology at Hunter. That same year she found employment with the wardrobe department of the Depression-era National Youth Administration (NYA). Created in 1935, the NYA was a New Deal program designed to address the problem of unemployment among young Americans by offering grants to high-school and college students in exchange for work. For young people who were not enrolled in school and who were unemployed, the NYA offered on-the-job training on federally funded work projects. By 1937 there was also a special program for African Americans directed by Mary McLeod Bethune. Primus had taken dance classes throughout her time at Hunter, but the NYA provided her with her first opportunity to perform. She danced in a program entitled America Dances. With this performance she gained a number of admirers and supporters who encouraged her to continue with dance.
During this period, Primus also became involved with two institutions that would help to nurture her artistic and political visions. She worked as a counselor at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (short for Workers Children’s Camp), a leftist children’s camp in rural New Jersey, and she auditioned for and was granted a scholarship to the New Dance Group’s school. Founded in 1934, Camp Wo-Chi-Ca was fully integrated and offered scholarships to students who couldn’t otherwise afford to attend. The young Primus was in fine company when she joined the staff of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca as a dance counselor. Visitors to the camp included the painter Charles White, the author Howard Fast, painter Jacob Lawrence, sculptor Augusta Savage, and poet Langston Hughes, and many of these artists would become Primus’s friends and collaborators in later years. In fact, one of her charges was Paul Robeson Jr., son of the famed activist and performer. Primus taught the younger Robeson how to Lindy, and Robeson Sr. told her she was responsible for the holes in his rug, a result of countless hours of his son’s practicing. The camp would gain attention in later years for its continued support of Paul Robeson when he was targeted as a Communist during the height of the McCarthy era.
The New Dance Group had been established in 1932 by artists dedicated to social change through dance, and its studio was the only place in New York where one could take racially integrated dance classes. However, the atmosphere among the students was not always welcoming. Primus was one of four selected to receive scholarships out of a total of twenty-seven dancers who auditioned for spaces; the “award” required her to do menial labor—washing floors and cleaning toilets—in exchange for two hours of instruction per week. At times white students would purposely bump into Primus on the studio dance floor. These small gestures of hostility were evidence of the racist indignities quietly suffered by black people in even the most liberal of settings. Still, Primus persevered, and her experiences as a student, a dancer, and a worker all helped to shape her art, her politics, and her philosophical outlook.
Young dancers at the New Dance Group were exposed to leftist and progressive political thought and activism, but Primus came to the school with her own progressive political principles. There she found an affirmation of her commitment to linking social change with modern dance. In addition to encouraging students to be cognizant of the relationship between politics and dance, the New Dance Group provided exquisite technical training. At their studios, Primus studied ballet, modern dance, tap dance, and cultural dances from other countries as well as dance history, philosophy, and choreography. She was taught by the leading luminaries of modern dance, including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Beryl McBurnie. Primus credited Weidman’s work with “aiding me in the use of speed and distance on the stage.”19 McBurnie, also known as “La Belle Rosette,” was a Trinidadian dancer and choreographer who also taught Katherine Dunham, Geoffrey Holder, and Primus’s future husband, Percival Borde. Judith Delmer, the secretary of the New Dance Group, introduced Primus to African sculpture, from which the young dancer learned postures and angles. From photographs and collections of African art housed throughout the city, she made note of bodies leaning forward in relaxed stances, the connection of the feet to the earth, and the use of the free and relaxed hand.20
Primus soon became entrenched in the world of modern dance. She also quickly emerged as one of the city’s most promising young dancers. On Valentine’s Day 1943, she made her professional debut as part of a program at the 92nd Street Y entitled Five Dancers, featuring Nona Schurman, Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, Julia Levien, and Iris Mabry, all of whom would, like Primus, become major figures in modern dance performance and scholarship. There Primus premiered two solos, “African Ceremonial” and “Hear-de-Lans-a-Crying.” It had taken her six months to research and create “African Ceremonial.” In preparation, she read books, journals, and travel diaries. She looked at photos, paintings, and drawings in museums. She spoke with African graduate students and worked with Norman Coker, a dancer from West Africa who had worked with Asadata Dafora.21
Of Five Dancers, John Martin, dance critic at the New York Times, wrote: “If Miss Primus walked away with the lion’s share of the honors, it was partly because her material was more theatrically effective, but also partly because she is a remarkably gifted artist.” Martin went on to write that while Primus had been seen in New Dance Group productions and with Belle Rosette, she deserved a company of her own. Following her appearance at Five Dancers, the “audience literally yelled for more of her.”22
What a debut! Martin, the most influential critic of modern dance, would become Primus’s champion and adviser. In person, Martin encouraged her to pursue dance full-time, noting that through the dance she could also heal people. While he saw her as “the most gifted artist-dancer of her race,” he also noted that “it would be manifestly unfair to classify her merely as an outstanding Negro dancer, for by any standard of comparison she is an outstanding dancer without regard for race.”23 Martin further raved, “She has tremendous inward power, a fine dramatic sense, a talent for comedy and, marvelous to relate, a really superb technique with which to eternalize them.” When a critic of Martin’s stature singles out a young dancer, others of power and influence take notice. Martin’s personal encouragement and his published reviews nurtured the young dancer and helped to create audience curiosity and enthusiasm for her performances.
Martin, along with a number of other white critics, seemed to prefer Primus to Katherine Dunham. Dunham was the best-known black modern dancer for many years. Her shadow looms large. She is the point of comparison for all black dancers and choreographers who seek to make a name for themselves in the field of modern dance. Ten years Primus’s senior, Dunham had founded her first company in 1937 and had begun researching dance in Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, and Martinique in 1936. This research would ultimately culminate in the publication of numerous writings as well as the development of a movement vocabulary—the Dunham technique. The company gained a great deal of attention when it premiered at New York’s Windsor Theater. By the year of Primus’s debut, Dunham and her company had appeared in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather; two years later, in 1945, she opened the Dunham School of Dance and Theater in New York. In order to fully appreciate Primus, it is important to understand what she shared with, and how she departed from, Dunham, who certainly blazed a path for her.24
Pearl Primus, October 11, 1943. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.
Dunham and Primus were early recognized as important figures in dance. When Margaret Lloyd published The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance in 1949, the first major history of the form, she included sections on both dancers. In doing so, Lloyd acknowledged the significant contributions made by both dancers. She made note of their differences as well. Dunham brought a sense of showmanship, drama, and glamour to her performances of Caribbean-inspired dances. Critics found Dunham’s choreography more sexual than Primus’s, but Primus brought greater physical power to her movements. Primus presented African, Caribbean, and black American dances on the stage without glamorizing them and sought to use the stage to educate viewers about lesser-known histories and cultures. Many white critics, including Lloyd, seemed more comfortable with Primus; for them, she represented dance in its “authentic” form. It is unclear whether this was an estimation reserved for black dancers. Finally, unlike Dunham, Primus avoided personal contact with her audience. In this way, she was like her friend, pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams and other members of the young generation of emerging bebop musicians, all of whom sought to emphasize their identity as serious artists as much, if not more so, than the role of entertainer. For some black women, in particular, it was sometimes necessary to create a kind of self-protective distance from an audience that might project fantasies of sexual availability onto their performance.
While the black press appreciated what both Dunham and Primus had to offer, Dunham received the lion’s share of attention; she was the bigger and more accomplished star and an outspoken critic of racial segregation. She also fit the standard of beauty that dominated the black press. Dunham had her own company, and her productions were more theatrical. However, at least one article in the Amsterdam News applauded Primus’s seriousness over Dunham’s turn to skimpy costumes and Hollywood.25
Speaking of the difference between herself and Primus, Dunham told an interviewer, “As far as some relationships between our choreography, our work, our plans, or intentions I don’t think that exists. I think that Pearl Primus is chiefly African oriented. I think she has done a great job in bringing this to the American public. Whereas my work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic.” She went on to observe, “I would say my interest is not to reconstruct or present from an anthropologist point of view African material and I admire Pearl Primus for this because that seems to be her intention. I am more interested in what can I do creatively with the material that comes from these backgrounds that I am interested in.”26
While there is an expression of mutual respect, there is no discussion of friendship or collaboration. Dunham seems to suggest that Primus is primarily interested in reproducing authentic African dance for American audiences, while she is inspired by dances of the diaspora to create something new. Ultimately, she is making a distinction between the academic and the artist, identifying herself as the latter. It is not a distinction Primus would likely have made. She saw herself as both scholar and artist. Her understanding of “artist” was not as the individual who stands apart from the community; instead, it was a role chosen by the ancestors and created for the community to embody its history, bear its culture, and provide it with a vision, a path, and capacity for the future.
Modern dance had emerged in the early twentieth century, and by the forties it still did not have the status of classical ballet. Modern dancers might appear on a concert stage on Tuesday and perform as part of a vaudeville review on Wednesday. Despite the fame her performance in Five Dancers brought her, Primus could not expect to make a living through modern dance alone. Unlike Dunham’s own dance company, few modern dance companies were racially integrated. So, like many famed dancers, singers, and musicians of her generation, especially black artists, Primus entered the nightclub scene and began performing at the legendary Café Society.
Much has been written about Café Society. Founded by Barney Josephson, it opened in 1938 in Greenwich Village. The first racially integrated club in New York, Café Society quickly became a gathering place for liberal and leftist socialites, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. The club’s reputation is well deserved when we consider the patrons and the artists who found their way there. The club was the site of political education for a number of artists as well as the venue where they found their individual creative voices. It is perhaps best known as the place where Billie Holiday introduced “Strange Fruit,” but the club also helped to launch the careers of Lena Horne and Hazel Scott. Café Society lacked a chorus line and hatcheck girls; instead, it showcased comedians and vocalists, self-accompanying solo artists, an ensemble, a boogie-woogie pianist, a solo pianist, a dance orchestra, and sometimes, a dancer. Zero Mostel, Imogene Coca, Josh White, Teddy Wilson, Albert Ammons, and, after the summer of ’43, Mary Lou Williams were but some of the artists who appeared there. John Hammond was the club’s musical director. Its employees—cooks, waiters, musicians, and comedians—were all unionized.
The nightclub and its owner are just as well known for their leftist Popular Front politics as for the talent that appeared there. Indeed, the club was rumored to have started as a fundraising vehicle for the Communist Party. Barney Josephson’s brother was a noted member of the Communist Party, and Josephson himself remained under FBI surveillance for almost twenty years. Eventually, J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with routing out Communists would lead to the club’s demise, but in the early 1940s it was still a breeding ground for politically minded artists and activists. On any given night, one might find Walter White, Ralph Bunche, Richard Wright, E. Franklin Frazier, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, or Sterling Brown in the audience. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. might drop in, especially when he began courting Hazel Scott, though he was married. One night Eleanor Roosevelt paid a visit. The Café Society audience was made up of intellectuals, writers, labor activists, jazz fans, students, and celebrities. One might find Nelson Rockefeller seated next to Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, or Gene Kelley, or meet a young Betty Perske, on her way to becoming as famous as Lauren Bacall. Here was a gathering of Rorty’s Reformist Left.27
In the spring of 1943, Primus successfully auditioned for Barney Josephson at Café Society Downtown. She had been working as a switchboard operator and going to school at the time, when a man on the street recognized her and said, “Hey, aren’t you dat kid John Martin wrote about? What the hell are you doing here? Why don’t you go down to Café Society?” She had never been to a nightclub before, though she had frequented the Savoy, where she danced the Lindy Hop. In an unpublished interview with Elsa Wren, Primus later recalled, “I had on a pale blue scarf, a pleated skirt, an organdy blouse and red shoes and socks.” Josephson was not impressed. He had presented Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Hazel Scott, all of whom were known for their glamorous sophistication. Primus showed him her clippings and told him, “The person you see sitting here is not the person you’d see on stage, they are two completely different things.” Josephson remembered, “You form an opinion when someone comes looking for a job, how they come dressed, how their hair is combed, wanting to make a good impression. This woman came in not really well-groomed, as if she just had not bothered getting herself ready for an audition. I was very unimpressed. I didn’t know then that she was a graduate of Hunter College in biology and even then she was studying for her master’s degree in psychology.” He thought, “Oh god, I can’t present anyone who looks like this.”28
Josephson told her his record player wasn’t working. “I just wanted to put her off. I didn’t want to audition her. Well, she was tearful.” After she told him she was working for the National Maritime Workers Union as a clerk and that she couldn’t afford to take another day off from work, he agreed to see her dance. “She took one leap, one leg behind, both arms outstretched, I thought she’d go through the wall. Her legs were very muscular, like a man’s legs, power like iron, and bronze, her color.” Josephson preferred jazz tap dancing and cared little for ballet and modern dance, but admitted, “As little as I know about dance, and that was little enough, when I saw that leap I knew it was something. This woman, whom I had been trying to get rid of, knocked me off my ass.”29 He hired her on the spot to work at Café Society Downtown, and she opened in April for a ten-month engagement.
The reason Josephson did not find Primus physically attractive may have been that his notions of beauty were more along the lines of Lena Horne and Billie Holiday. Holiday noted that Josephson thought Hazel Scott was “too dark” until he heard her play. Eventually, Scott’s talent won him over, and he would become physically attracted to her as well. She became his most successful star and the darling of Café Society Uptown. But soon Primus would herald a new kind of beauty for black women, one that would become common among modern dancers and other bohemian artists, in particular. Primus recalled, “I had not, except in instances like Paul Robeson or Marian Anderson or Billie Holiday, come across as a beautiful woman because I was dark. . . . There were times, and I wore my hair quite natural, when I was accosted on the streets and those were the days when if you were fair you were bea-u-ti-ful if your nose was a certain way, you were bea-u-ti-ful and that was that.”30
Dancers live in and are defined by their bodies, and Primus’s was the perfect body for the kind of dance that would ultimately call her. Beautiful and sculpted, with muscular quadriceps that propelled her into the air when necessary, it was not a body familiar to the Western concert stage. Katherine Dunham was considered the sultry beauty, but the press never spoke of Primus in those terms. Instead, she was “strong,” “powerful,” “earthy,” “stocky,” “pure.” In 1947, Time magazine identified her as “a squat, powerful Negro girl.” Four years later, the same magazine called her “a stocky, powerhouse dancer.”31 In the earlier article, Primus described herself: “My body is built for heavy stomping, powerful dignity.” On the pages of grant-making reports or even mainstream publications, her body was often described as “heavy,” even “overweight,” although she weighed only 115 pounds in her twenties. Even her contemporaries made note of her body. Dancer and dance historian Joe Nash recalled, of his first meeting with her, “This short, dark skinned girl . . . she didn’t have the body of a dancer.” Another dancer, Muriel Mannings, noted, “Her body was different than most dancers’ bodies. She was chunky.”32 A contemporary reader might be struck by the similarity of adjectives used to describe Primus and tennis star Serena Williams, or former Olympic ice skater Surya Bonaly, both of whom are admired for their athleticism and power, but whose grace, femininity, and beauty have been questioned.
But Primus would pave the way for a different kind of physical type. If people like Josephson did not find her beautiful, some young women were inspired by her personal aesthetic. While a student at Primus’s alma mater, Hunter College High School, where Primus came to speak, the young poet Audre Lorde sat mesmerized by Primus’s tales of Africa—and her natural hair. Lorde left the auditorium and, on her way to her Harlem home, stopped in a barbershop and had her hair cut into a short natural style.
Black modern dancers would be among the first notable black women to wear their hair natural. The rigorous movement required of modern dancers made it difficult for them to maintain processed or straightened hair. For figures such as Primus, and later her student, a young Maya Angelou, unprocessed hair styles were born of necessity. Because these women carried themselves with an air of pride and confidence, their hair came to connote similar sentiments. They were among a rare group of black women who were able to defy convention and forgo straightening their hair. This would not be the case for the majority of black American women until the sixties. As late as 1966, Phyl Garland wrote an article in Ebony magazine about the new affinity for natural hair, citing Primus as an early champion: “This key element in the black female’s mystique was, until recently, challenged only by a few bold bohemians, a handful of entertainers and dancing ethnologists like Pearl Primus, whose identification with the exotic placed them beyond the pale of convention.” In this way Primus was a pioneer for women like Cicely Tyson, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone who would be purveyors of the new sensibility during the “Black is Beautiful” sixties.33
Nightly at Café Society Primus worked on her choreography. She found inspiration from other artists and made contacts for future performances and other venues. There she honed her craft and became a part of the community of artists who performed there. As Primus would later explain, “Cafe Society is the place where my discovery became more than a one night thing.”34 At Café Society, Primus met and befriended Josh White and Mary Lou Williams, and she would dance to songs created and performed by both of them. Josephson teamed her up with White for “Hard Time Blues,” which Primus would perform at the 1943 Negro Freedom Rally. Williams, meanwhile, dedicated one part of her famed Zodiac Suite, “Capricorn,” to Primus, and Primus danced to that piece as well.
The most important collaboration between Primus and Williams was a piece called “The Study in Nothing,” which they performed on June 1, 1944, at Hunter College. They were both very serious artists, devoted to the development of their craft and the artistic expression of their ideas. Neither interacted playfully with her audiences, and for this, each would be criticized. Although both had experienced the sting of colorism in their own communities, Williams was the more glamorous of the two, with her thick, straightened hair and her beautiful gowns, minks, and extensive collection of shoes. But here, they came together as artists, and their relationship provided them the space to take risks, to be inventive, to explore, and even to be playful. The piece was a humorous duet with piano and offered the women an opportunity to produce something experimental, abstract, nonrepresentational, and nonracial. Significantly, they did not create a work about being black women. Their shared race and gender seem to have freed them to transcend both of those identities, if only momentarily, to explore a more abstract, aesthetic collaboration. Unfortunately, the performance was not recorded, but those who saw it described it as one individual responding to the sound of a singular musical note. Dancer and audience chased the sound.35
Collaborations like this one made Café Society the most important performance venue for Primus during this time in her career. Primus’s seriousness, along with her ambition, may have made her a difficult person to work with, but numerous artists, including John Cage, Langston Hughes, Owen Dodson, Mary Lou Williams, and Josh White, nevertheless did collaborate with her. Cage composed “Our Spring Will Come” for his work with Primus. It was to have been accompanied by the recitation of a Langston Hughes poem. The John Cage Trust describes the piece as “a lively and rhythmically intense work, set in a kind of rondo form.”36 Josh White was a frequent collaborator with Primus. In addition to performing at Café Society together, White and Primus toured throughout the United States in the 1940s, and Primus would continue to include works set to his music in her repertoire for years to come.
Pearl Primus performs to “Honeysuckle Rose” as played by Teddy Wilson (piano), Lou McGarity (trombone), Sidney Catlett (drums), Bobby Hackett (trumpet), and John Simons (bass). For more information, see “Giants at Play: Life with Jazz Legends,” Life, Time Life Historic Moments (photo gallery), especially http://life.time.com/culture/photos-of-jazz-legends-duke-ellington-billie-holiday-dizzy-and-more/#2. Photo by Gjon Mili.
At Café Society, Primus was ensconced in a community of innovative and politically minded artists, activists, and intellectuals who were open to new aesthetic expressions. She had found encouraging supporters in Josephson and Martin. The club was central to her ascendancy in 1943. In June, she made her show-stopping leaps at the Negro Freedom Rally. In August, John Martin named Primus “the most distinguished newcomer of the season,” even though “there were more newcomers than usual in this wartime season.” By the end of that year, Primus had choreographed and premiered a number of dances inspired by the works of other Café Society habitués. She choreographed “Strange Fruit” to Lewis Allan’s poem, made famous in the 1939 song of the same title recorded by Billie Holiday.37 She also choreographed “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem. Her photograph appeared in Life magazine, and she closed the year with a performance at the African Dance Festival at Carnegie Hall, where she appeared with Asadata Dafora. Eleanor Roosevelt was in attendance.
Like other artists committed to Double V during the height of the war, Primus used her art both to protest against racism and to demonstrate her support for the war effort. For instance, in addition to her concert performances, Primus often entertained the troops at USO events, later recalling that they loved her jazz dances the best. In fact, in 1944 she received a USO Certificate of Merit for entertaining servicemen in camps, hospitals, and ports of embarkation.38
Sometime during this period, Primus met a young Jewish man named Yael Woll. Though she seems to have left little time for a personal life, she would eventually marry him. Himself a leftist, Woll later recalled having met her in the early 1940s, most likely at an event or benefit where she performed. Few details about their relationship exist. When they married in 1950, few people in Primus’s life seem to have known about it. However, Jet magazine, in 1952, listed Primus, along with Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Hilda Simms, and Josephine Baker, as prominent black women who were married to white men. Woll, who later became a film and television director, worked closely with Primus, serving as a kind of stage manager during her tours. He seems to have been a very supportive husband. The two traveled together to Israel in 1952, where she performed and where the press referred to her as “Mrs. Yael Woll.” Woll was apparently disappointed by her extended travel to Africa, which kept her away from home for months at a time. During one trip to Trinidad, while still married to Woll, Primus fell in love with the Trinidadian dancer Percival Borde. Primus often noted that she and Borde married in 1954, but she did not officially marry him until 1961. After that time, she rarely mentioned Woll. She basically erased him from her history, referring to Borde as her first and only husband.39
Prior to her first marriage, in the summer of 1944, Pearl Primus left New York to travel extensively throughout the Deep South in search of material for her dance. However, the trip yielded much more: it also strengthened her political resolve. This change would influence the way she portrayed these struggles. Of her travels in the South during this period, Primus later told the Daily Worker: “I am not trying to create something new in the dance. . . . I am only attempting to present the Negro in his own true light as he was in Africa and as he is now, a member of a fighting democracy.”40 Again, though dance is her medium, here she represents herself as a scholar or a journalist seeking to reveal the truth, rather than as a creative artist who is inspired by her findings. Primus highlights the dignity of the African past while calling attention to the black contribution to the most important struggle of modern times. She sought to present “Negroes” as people with a history as well as modern subjects, cocreators in contemporary civilization.
Primus did not romanticize southern life. Of the South, she wrote, “The Spanish moss hangs like a crepe over everything, is a fungus that creeps through everybody.”41 She wasn’t nostalgic for a past that never was; nor did she look longingly to the South as a home, like many black migrants. Instead, she wanted to experience firsthand the land that informed the sensibilities of many of her contemporaries and audiences. A large number of African Americans living in northern cities were recent migrants who had come north during the Great Migrations, and she wanted to understand the world they had left behind.
Primus’s trip to the South was an eye-opener for her. She didn’t see a world of victims and villains: “I could not hate anyone,” she later said. “It was a pathetic scene, both sides swallowed by fear of one another. Everything looked ugly to me there—the Negroes because of their hunger and feeling of inferiority, the whites because of their fear and hunger.” Her experience was not one that made her fall in love with black southerners. Nor did it cause her to hate whites. In fact, a few encounters with whites made her question her own assumptions. When she started to faint in a Jim Crow bus, a white man got up and offered her his seat.42
Primus sought to know intimately the landscape and the people, so she disguised herself as a field worker, worked alongside sharecroppers, and visited their churches in the evenings and on the weekends. It was in church that she made note of the core rhythms of black music, oratory, and movement: the preacher’s intonations were as rhythmic as the drum, his movements as dramatic and graceful as a dance. The congregation responded to him with tears, ecstatic movement—shouting and leaping from their seats. Primus observed leaps and crawling bodies, “snake-like undulations” not unlike the dances to the god Damballa in the Caribbean. She began to see connections between the Caribbean dances with which she was familiar and the movement she observed among former slaves in the South. She visited little churches and open-air prayer meetings in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, and everywhere she observed similar kinds of movement.43
Primus had danced the part of a sharecropper in “Hard Time Blues” at the Negro Freedom Rally, but now she bore witness to their bodies and movements. During this trip, Primus joined a historic trail of black intellectuals whose first encounters with the American South would inform their artistic, intellectual, and political sensibilities forever. W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and the painter Eldzier Cortor, among others, undertook this “Journey of Immersion” before emerging as people who could articulate the concerns of American blacks and build upon both the pain and the beauty of life under Jim Crow. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who was born in Alabama and raised in Florida, left New York for extended forays into the South, a place believed to be the fount of African American culture. Primus would later say:
If I were dancing about how sharecropping or how our spirituals came into being and what they mean in the lives of people or if I wanted to know the truth about the commissary stores that refused food to the people, then I wanted to know what they were like. . . . That’s why I went south. I went south to live among the people and to be part of the cultures of the Southlands to know what cotton was. Except for the museum up here in New York . . . I didn’t know what it was. . . . I did get into the fields and along the dockside and into the revival churches of the South. I walked those long dusty roads between towns. So when I began to create about these experiences the remembered feelings were part of what I was speaking about. It wasn’t that I’d read about it but that I had experienced it.44
This would be the same reason she ultimately went to Africa: to move beyond reading in order to experience what her migrant audience had experienced; to witness and bear witness to what Du Bois had called, in the title of his 1903 book, the “Souls of Black Folk.” She saw and placed movement in context. The trip to the American South was the first time she brought this kind of methodology to dance.
It was also during this period that Primus tied her political activism to the causes of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). Founded in 1937, SNYC was an organization of young black activists who were devoted to guaranteeing and protecting the rights of southern blacks. They worked closely with a number of leftist and political organizations, black and white. According to her FBI file, Primus attended the organization’s Leadership School in Atlanta from August 7 through August 18, 1944, right in the middle of her research trip. SNYC’s Leadership Academies were held throughout the South. Prominent activists and educators attended the one in Atlanta, including Horace Mann Bond, an educator and leader who was also the father of civil rights activist Julian Bond. Primus would have joined students, people from the community, teachers, sharecroppers, and faculty members of neighboring black colleges for these classes.45
Given the nature of her research among southern sharecroppers, it is not surprising that Primus would have been moved by their condition and want to help alleviate their economic, social, and political sufferings. As an activist-minded artist, she would have been drawn to other courageous young people working to empower southern blacks. The young people of the Southern Negro Youth Conference represented a cross-section of the black community. Many, such as Esther Cooper Jackson, her husband James Jackson, and Louis and Dorothy Burnham, were college-educated young people from the North who came to Alabama to organize rural blacks. Esther Cooper Jackson received her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and her master’s in sociology from Fisk, where she wrote a thesis on organizing black domestic workers in New York. She was on her way to the University of Chicago for a PhD when she went to Alabama to work on a SNYC voter registration drive. Other members of SNYC were young sharecroppers or factory workers. Still others were young southern students, such as Sallye Bell Davis, a Birmingham native and student at Miles College. Davis would give birth to radical activist Angela Davis.
Many of the members of SNYC were also members of the Communist Party. But, like those black Americans who were committed to Double V, who were more focused on waging national battles for equality and civil rights than on pursuing the goals of international communism, SNYC didn’t have explicit ties to the Soviet Union. As Esther Cooper Jackson later asserted: “There wasn’t anybody from Moscow telling us what to do.” One of the organization’s pamphlets said, “We Negro Youth act to win the full blessing of true democracy for ourselves, for our people, for our nation.”46 They were committed to the vision of an interracial society free of poverty and racism where all people would exercise their right to vote and have the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Because SNYC activists understood the centrality of the expressive arts to black Americans, they also placed a premium on the “unique Black cultural heritage,” making the arts central to their organization and to their vision of the world they sought to create. James Jackson invited Primus to contribute an essay on the “Negro Youth’s Heritage in Dance” for one of SNYC’s publications. Primus wrote that she was “truly happy to be called on to write the essay.”47
Given the FBI’s ongoing campaigns against black activists and Communists, the Bureau was especially interested in SNYC. It is therefore not surprising that investigators made note of Primus’s involvement with the young radicals. They opened a file on her in September 1944. According to Primus’s file, at this time she was also a member of the Communist Party and had been involved in the party since her college years, when she was a member of the Young Communist League, an accusation that she would confirm in later years. If Primus was seen as a great “Negro” dancer by reviewers and other members of the press who hailed her artistry, for the FBI she was “a negress born July 1, 1917[,] at Trinidad, British West Indies.”48 She seems to have first come to their attention when an informant reported that she had been in touch with the Communist Political Association to invite Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945, to her performance.
According to her file, Primus had participated in a number of Communist-sponsored events that encouraged interracial unity and harmony. The Bureau noted her own sponsorship of the Citizens Non-Partisan Committee to Elect Benjamin Davis, the black Communist city councilman from Harlem; her participation in the Negro Freedom Rally, which it referred to as a “monstrous annual affair” run by Communist front organizations; her performances at the Harlem Youth Center and Café Society; and all of the coverage she received in the Daily Worker. In this she would have been no different from a number of other prominent artists and intellectuals of the Reformist Left. Like many of these artists, Primus would not have been likely to have had the exposure or critical success that she had without the support of these progressive political and cultural organizations.49 Many of these organizations were already under surveillance and would become the objects of government investigation during the McCarthy years.
In an interview in the Daily Worker in September 1944, Primus spoke “highly of the Southern Negro Congress, with whose leaders she had discussed a plan to include the Arts in their organizing drives,” and articulated a philosophy that mirrored the one behind the Double V Campaign. The statement and the context in which it was made helped to make her of interest to the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. From the distance of time, her perspective doesn’t seem that radical. In fact, she appears patriotic, committed to a US victory against fascism, and as fervently devoted to fighting racism at home. Her stance seems little different from that of the civil rights movement then in its infancy, which would soon blossom at the very center of American political life. For the next year, the Bureau sought to find out her naturalization status. But by May 30, 1945, the FBI had lost interest. A note in her file said, “There is no information in the files to indicate that she is either a prominent or influential Communist. Because of her dancing engagements, and theatrical work, it is believed she has very little time for actual Communist activity at present. In view of the fact that she is not considered dangerous to the internal security of the United States at the present time, it is recommended that the Security Index card on Primus be cancelled.” The file would be reopened, however, in 1951.50
In the FBI affidavit she later gave, Primus said she was led to believe that the best way to aid the Negro in the United States “was through the Communist Party.” According to Primus, she joined the party shortly after the Negro Freedom Rally: “My reason for joining the Communist Party, if in fact, I did so, was that I believed that the lot of the Negro in the United States would be best served by the Communist Party.” After returning from the South, where she was “appalled” by the conditions of the southern Negro, she resolved to “do whatever possible to help this situation.” She went to the Daily Worker with suggestions for addressing racial issues more effectively. She wanted to petition the president and Congress, but the receptionist told her that this would be considered treason while the country was still at war. According to Primus, the party’s retreat from racial issues during the war years “angered and upset her.” In this way she was not unlike the many black activists—or even the fictional protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, published in the same year of Primus’s affidavit. These activists and intellectuals claimed that the Communist Party had abandoned an explicit commitment to the black struggle in favor of supporting the image of a united front between the United States and the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism. They believed that this decision had resulted in the party’s unwillingness to be a vocal critic of American racism.
Following her return from the South in 1944, Primus claimed to have suffered a nervous breakdown. Isolated and having received no word or support from her political colleagues, she convalesced at the home of Rockwell Kent at AuSable Forks, New York. Kent was a painter, printmaker, and writer, and Primus had met him at Café Society. After a brief stay at Kent’s home, Primus moved to 536 Madison Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. While Manhattan would continue to be central to her performance life, she would now call Brooklyn her home. Bedford-Stuyvesant had been a black enclave as early as the nineteenth century, when James Weeks, an African American entrepreneur, began to sell land to other blacks, and some blacks had moved from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant beginning in the 1930s. The area presented the opportunity for home ownership, and many blacks, particularly Caribbean immigrants, chose to relocate there. Madison Street, known for its stately and beautiful brownstones, predominantly housed middle-class blacks. When the A train was constructed in 1936, the New York subway linked the city’s two most important black neighborhoods, Harlem and Bed-Stuy.
Upon her recovery, Primus began preparing for her Broadway premier at the Belasco Theater. New York once again provided her with the venue and the audience for her new work. As part of the Belasco program, Primus performed updated versions of “African Ceremonial,” “Hard Time Blues,” and “Strange Fruit.” Her experiences in the South had made her rethink some of her earlier dances. With “Strange Fruit,” she would join artists, black and white, who created works that addressed lynching. Talley Beatty premiered “Southern Landscape” in 1947, and Dunham presented “Southland” in 1950. In 1960, Gwendolyn Brooks would write a poem from the perspective of a young white mother who had to continue living with her husband after he brutally murdered a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till, supposedly for flirting with her. One of the earliest such works, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poem called “The Haunted Oak,” had appeared in 1903.
Primus’s new version of “Strange Fruit” was choreographed as a solo, without music, accompanied only by the spoken words of the Lewis Allan poem. Primus wanted to focus not on the lynched victim or a member of his or her family, but instead on a member of the lynch mob, a woman who had watched the deed. Primus said the character was “not one beloved of the victim, but one of the lynch mob who had been screaming and shouting in animal fury with the rest. Then, the act accomplished and the satisfied mob departed, this one, drained of the poison, stays behind, realizing with grief and terror what has been done.”51
“Strange Fruit” differed from other Primus performances. Gone were the leaps. In their place, there is a body on the floor, a writhing, distraught human figure, reaching to the tree one moment, fallen down in twists and turns the next. And running but getting nowhere: running in a circle. The isolation of the figure was striking—its profound aloneness, its separateness from both the mob and the lynched body. Its physical isolation seemed to mirror a kind of psychological isolation, a person tormented by her mind, by the lingering horror of what she has witnessed and in which she has participated. There was no transcendence. There was no airy flight. The figure’s fixedness to the ground insisted upon a connection between the legacy, the torment and restlessness, of the southern land.
As in “Jim Crow Train,” Primus made the lynching scene a canonical moment for her New York audiences. She brought the tragic dimensions of the South to the northern stage in an effort to provoke empathy and action. Like the authors of slave narratives, who often presented sensitive white female characters with whom their northern audiences could identify, Primus made her protagonist a white woman—but one who had both witnessed and taken part in the brutal act. Through works like “Hard Time Blues,” “Jim Crow Train,” and “Strange Fruit,” Primus created a dance narrative of black southern life for New York audiences. This sophisticated group would understand, appreciate, and be moved to political action by her performance.
There is very little footage of Primus dancing in the forties. However, we do have access to eyewitness descriptions and a contemporary restaging that help us appreciate Primus’s talent as a dancer and choreographer. In 1945, Donald McKayle, then a high-school senior, saw Primus perform at Central High School of Needle Trades in New York’s garment district. McKayle, who attended a different high school, had been invited by his friend Anna, who was an aspiring dancer—and McKayle himself eventually became a dancer. His description is worth quoting at length because it is one of the few firsthand accounts of a Primus concert by someone who was not a critic: “A beautiful vision, a carving in ebony, was dancing. . . . The movements were powerful, yet sparse. It was living sculpture on view. Every curving of her spine, every thrust of her hips, every flapping of her loins, every wave of her heavily bangled wrists was a gesture from an ancestral ritual of unknown origin.” He was especially moved by “Strange Fruit”: “She was a woman consumed with horror, recoiling from a lynching she had just witnessed,” as the words of the poem were “spoken so beautifully by the actress Vinette Carrol,” he later wrote. The author of the poem “Strange Fruit,” Lewis Allan, was actually McKayle’s English teacher that year. After seeing Primus dance—“her feet (running) along the air and then she landed with the assurance of an avian creature”—McKayle knew he wanted to be a dancer. He told Anna, “I want to dance like her!”52
Thankfully, a few Primus pieces of the 1940s have been restaged by contemporary choreographers, including “Strange Fruit,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and “Hard Time Blues.” The choreographer and founder of Urban Bush Women, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, created a work dedicated to Primus entitled “Walking with Pearl . . . Southern Diaries” inspired by Primus’s trip to the US South and the dances she created based on that research. The piece includes a restaging of Primus’s “Hard Time Blues” by Kim Bears-Bailey. The quotidian movement of black rural life in the 1940s permeates the movements of this dance, from the field to the church house, climaxing in the ecstatic “shout” of the black worshipper. In Zollar’s restaging, a series of dancers take on the part that Primus danced solo, each expressing the pain, the suffering, the self-expression, the ecstatic worship and release of the field-worker. So convincing were the dancers that Zollar has to remind us of all the technical work, all the rehearsal and preparation that one must bring to the moment of performance in order to reach a zone where individual stories can be relayed. For Zollar, dancers are actors, movement actors. “It is not ritual, but performance,” says Zollar. As if to remind viewers of Primus’s skill, Zollar notes that the numerous leaps required of the piece challenge even the best of dancers, requiring the dexterity and strength of “a highly skilled athlete.”53
When Primus performed “Hard Time Blues” at the Belasco, she was accompanied by Josh White, who sang the song to guitar accompaniment while she danced. The program also included five male dancers as well as a jazz band and a narrator, who supplied commentary throughout. In addition to “African Ceremonial,” “Strange Fruit,” “Rock Daniel,” and “Hard Time Blues,” she also performed “Study in Nothing,” set to the music of her Café Society colleague and friend Mary Lou Williams. “Slave Market” was a new addition to her repertoire and included two other dancers as well as a number of speakers and the music of the spirituals. For Broadway, Primus had clearly staged a more ambitious, theatrical performance, one that sought to entertain as well as enlighten.
The Belasco was Primus’s first Broadway appearance, but it would not be her last. She helped to choreograph Show Boat for its 1945–1946 season and performed in it as well. After appearing in the Chicago production of Emperor Jones, she returned to Broadway in Adolph Thenstead’s production of Caribbean Carnival at the International Theatre in 1947. She continued to perform throughout the city and began to tour nationally. With the help of her manager, Austin Wilder, Primus took the “Primus Company,” a new dance group she had formed, on a cross-country tour. She also continued to perform at benefits for progressive organizations and causes, which kept her under the watchful eye of the FBI.
Even throughout this busy period, during which she performed both in New York and nationally, Primus also continued to teach at the New Dance Group, helping to develop their offerings in ethnic dance studies. Along with dancers Josephine Premice and Hadassah, she helped to develop a West Indian Dance Program there.
Today, with companies like Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, the Dance Theater of Harlem, Philadanco, Urban Bush Women, Ron K. Brown’s Evidence, and others, it is difficult to appreciate the dearth of black concert dance in the 1940s and the explosive excitement created by Primus and Katherine Dunham. They approached their work as a mission, a calling, and took it upon themselves to train younger dancers and create opportunities for them.
Performing and teaching also gave Primus the opportunity to perfect her own technique. “The earth is the voice of the dancer. The dancer is the conductor, the wire, which connects the earth and the sky,” Primus told her dancers. Movement was marked by variations on the walk: leaping, skipping, hopping, jumping. There were isolated movements of specific body parts: the head, the shoulder, the torso, and the pelvic area. Dancer Jacqueline Hairston danced with Primus in the 1940s and described a typical Primus class. She recalled that the “ballet barre” was essential and that Primus incorporated the methods of Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm. She would have students warm up with stretches, bends, and bounces before going to floor exercises, contractions and releases, and isolations of the abdomen, back, legs, and ankles. Then she would work on technique built around three positions of the feet, those signifying a “Ceremonial Pose,” “Pride and Elegance,” and “Strength and Aggression.” These would be followed by the “Earth Series,” which focused on the feet in relation to the earth. Next, students would perform excerpts from dances that were already choreographed or those that were works in progress. Primus would close class by telling students the meaning, narrative, and history of one of the dances they had just practiced. An exquisite marriage of her modern dance training and her in-depth research about dance in Africa, Primus’s dance classes emphasized that each movement had meaning and each dance had a narrative and a history.54
Primus was always an intellectual artist as well as an activist, and her interest in creating her own technique stemmed from this intellectualism. Dance became a way of bearing witness to what her studies revealed, and her activism was driven by a desire to eliminate prejudice, discrimination, and white supremacy. The decision to pursue anthropology at Columbia University was one element in her pursuit of this goal. From 1945 to 1954, Primus took classes toward a PhD. In turning to Columbia, she chose a premier program with a number of pioneering scholars. Her scholarship helped to underscore the significance of African-based cultures, which were still denigrated in the popular imagination. To insist upon the significance of the continent and the cultures that it birthed was a political project in a white supremacist society.
Like Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham before her, Primus sought to imbue her artistic works with insights that she believed could be garnered from her academic study. In her book recounting the history of modern dance, Modern Bodies, Julia L. Foulkes noted that for black women such as Dunham, Primus, and dancer/choreographer Syvilla Fort, higher education helped to legitimate artistic pursuits. Anthropology was a field that attracted a number of women and minorities because it called for serious scientific investigation of all forms of culture and society, including those not yet deemed worthy of study by disciplines such as history or literature. Primus noted, in an interview, “With anthropology I could gain the facts about which I danced—the facts and not just the feelings.”55
Primus’s intellectual pursuits were driven by an activist motivation, not just an artistic one. Along with Hurston and Dunham, she adhered to a school of thought furthered by Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits, who countered claims that African Americans had lost any sense of connection to Africa. For them, Africa could be found in every element of diasporic cultures, from religious practices and foodways to music and dance. So, although Primus did not work with Boas or Herskovits, her work contributed to their broader project of situating Africa as central to the development of New World cultures.
At the beginning of her academic career at Columbia, Primus took classes such as “Primitive Languages,” “Cultural Dynamics,” “Peoples and Cultures of Africa,” “Native Cultures of South America,” “Primitive Art and Its Contribution to Modern Art,” and “Art of the Congo.” One is struck by the liberal use of the word “primitive” even in this most progressive department. In 1946, she took a course entitled “Religions of Primitive Peoples” with Ruth Benedict. The course was “a survey of the religious beliefs and religious techniques with special emphasis on religion in relation to the social order.” Benedict, a pioneering anthropologist, a student of Franz Boas, and a peer of Margaret Mead, championed the importance of acknowledging the value of cultures based on their own contexts. Benedict was the author of two major studies, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, on Japan, and Patterns of Culture, an introduction to cultural studies. She also coauthored, with colleague Gene Weltfish, an instructor with whom Primus also studied, a World War II–era pamphlet entitled “Races of Mankind.” Meant for servicemen, the pamphlet provided scientific arguments against racism. In short, Primus was taught by antiracist intellectuals whose scholarship demonstrated how scholarly work might inform a project of social change.
Primus did not finish her doctorate at Columbia. She would do so many years later at another of the city’s prominent educational institutions, New York University. However, Columbia was an important site of her intellectual development, and the Columbia Department of Anthropology provided her with some of the tools she needed to pursue her interest in the significance and centrality of dance. While attending classes, Primus continued to perform, and she further honed her teaching skills and her educational presentations about dance.
In 1945, under the auspices of the New Dance Group, Primus conducted a series of lectures and demonstrations on the influence of African dance on dance in Haiti and the American South. She was clearly establishing herself as both a performer and an intellectual. Articulate, intelligent, well educated, and well read, she was not only capable of executing sophisticated movement, but also had the chops to analyze and talk about what she performed. She had always aspired to be an educator, and her time at Columbia gave her the set of concepts she needed to convey the meaning and significance of her dancing. Dance, which provided access to a people’s culture and their struggle, was a perfect mechanism for teaching her audiences about their roots. The dancer could walk in their footsteps and express their longings. Given her commitment to education, it is not surprising that Primus embarked on a college tour.
During her company’s tour of black colleges, Primus performed at Fisk University in 1948. Dr. Edward Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, was in the audience. Convinced of the authenticity of her company’s performance, Dr. Embree asked Primus when she had last visited Africa. “I’ve never been,” Primus replied. Embree arranged for Primus to receive a $4,000 grant, the foundation’s last and largest research grant. The Rosenwald Fund had provided support for both Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham to conduct their own anthropological studies.
The Caribbean, especially Trinidad, and the American South had been Primus’s gateway to the traditions of Africa, but now she would have an opportunity to experience Africa firsthand. Armed with a gun, DDT, inoculations, and her studies in anthropological method, Primus left for her trip in December 1948. Obviously, she thought she would encounter bugs, disease, and violence. Instead, she acquired so much more. While there she traveled to the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Angola, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, French Equatorial Africa, and the Belgian Congo. She performed, learned from traditional dancers, and participated in spontaneous community dances. According to Primus, village elders throughout Africa believed the ancestors had taught her. In Nigeria, she was given the name Omowale, which meant “Child returned home.” Upon her return to the United States, she would become one of African dance’s major ambassadors, introducing generations of dancers and audiences to the dynamism, beauty, and history of African dance.
When Primus came back to the United States in 1950, she found a political climate that was vastly different from the one she had left when embarking on her African sojourn. Many of her colleagues and peers were under investigation, and the institutions that had nurtured her were challenged. She would continue to be the object of investigation and surveillance—an experience she shared with a number of her colleagues and collaborators. The FBI opened a file on Josephson in 1943 and placed him on the Security Index in 1944. From then on, he was under constant surveillance. By 1950 his passport was confiscated. J. Edgar Hoover and the powerful columnist Walter Winchell were architects of Café Society’s demise. Fittingly, the two often met at the tony Stork Club, the venue Café Society parodied. Eventually a number of people associated with the club would be blacklisted or required to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Zero Mostel, Paul Robeson, Canada Lee, Lewis Allan, Lillian Helman, Hazel Scott, Josh White, and Lena Horne were all called before the committee. In their appearances, Scott and White blamed their involvement with the Communist Left on Josephson.
Josephson later fell out with Primus because he emphatically believed she named names during the McCarthy era. Himself the victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt, he could never forgive her for having done so. He claimed that she told the press, “I don’t know why they’re doing this to me. I was an informer for the FBI all those years I was dancing at Café Society.” In his memoir, Josephson insisted that Primus was an informer even before this time, while she was working for the Maritime Union. There is no evidence for Josephson’s claims, even in Primus’s FBI file. Primus almost certainly never named names—though she did admit to her own attraction to and involvement with the Communist Party as well as her support of and sympathy for Communist causes during this period. Josephson went from being reluctant to hire her because of her appearance, to becoming an employer who supported her career, to becoming a former political ally who held her in contempt. He grew to resent her, believing that she had used him to establish her career and then left his club when other opportunities arose.56
Though he was probably wrong about her naming names, Josephson may have been correct in noting Primus’s ambition. Primus always recognized opportunities for advancement and seized them; where they did not exist, she created them. Many progressive people believed that appearing before the FBI or the House Un-American Activities Committee in and of itself legitimated their activities. Josephson would not have been alone in feeling betrayed by Primus, Josh White, and Hazel Scott, all of whom voluntarily met with government agencies during the anti-Communist hysteria.
By that time, Primus had traveled extensively through Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The FBI took her passport upon her return, thereby limiting her research, performance opportunities, and income. In this way her experience was like that of W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. Through her lawyer, Herbert Mont Levy of the American Civil Liberties Union, Primus set up an interview with the FBI offices in New York on October 2, 1952, for the sole purpose of obtaining her passport, with a follow-up meeting on October 16. There she provided letters and documents from numerous organizations said to have been Communist fronts. In a memo dated November 3, 1952, an FBI agent wrote: “In as much as the signed statement furnished by Miss Primus reflects that she is not presently connected with the Communist Party, no attempt will be made by the NYO to develop her as an informant. It is not believed that further investigation in this matter is warranted.” Another memo, dated November 21 (see Appendix A), is important because in spite of Josephson’s assertion to the contrary, it strongly suggests that she did not name names.57
In addition to finding a Left decimated by the federal government, Primus would also find a black movement that would compromise the goal of economic justice in order to make gains in domestic civil rights. The movement seemed to eschew the international dimensions of its calls for anti-colonial, racial equality.
In spite of this new political landscape, Primus continued to work to bring African culture to the international concert stage, and in so doing, she gained many admirers. She inspired poems, essays, and paintings. She continued to share her knowledge in the dance studio, in the lecture hall, and on the college campus. Along the way, she documented, analyzed, and theorized about the role of dance in human development. She inspired new generations of dancers and choreographers, from Alvin Ailey to Bill T. Jones to Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, all of whom paid tribute to her in their own choreography. By the time of her death in 1994, Pearl Primus was widely recognized as one of the foremothers of black concert dance.
In New York during the 1940s, Pearl Primus created a dance narrative that highlighted the struggle against segregation and racial violence. As such she made the plight of black Americans, particularly black southerners, a central concern in the fight for American democracy.
Seventeen years after Pearl Primus’s death, the novelist Sapphire created a fictional character, Toosie Johnston, who saw Primus dance in the 1940s. Through Toosie, Sapphire gives voice to those migrants who sat in Primus’s audience when she danced “Jim Crow Car,” “Hard Time Blues,” and “Strange Fruit”:
One night Pearl Primus herse’f, yes indeedy. Dat woman jumped five feet in de air if she jumped a inch! Den she did a dance to some country blues near ’bout tear my heart out watchin’ it. Made me think of de plantation, all what I escaped from, runned away from. Even all I been through, I still think it good I left. Josh White record playing while she dancin’. Everybody sittin’ dere knowed what she was talkin’ ’bout or was holdin’ on to somebody dat knew.”58
Sapphire’s fictional migrant captures the excitement of those who witnessed Pearl Primus’s choreographed flights. Her journeys through time and space spoke to their yearning and motivated their drive to change the nation and the world.
