Katherine Dunham

Katherine Mary Dunham (June 22, 1909 – May 21, 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers of the 20th century and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."

While a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham also performed as a dancer, ran a dance school and earned an early bachelor's degree in anthropology. Receiving a postgraduate academic fellowship, she went to the Caribbean to study the African diaspora, ethnography and local dance. She returned to graduate school and submitted a master's thesis to the anthropology faculty. She did not complete the other requirements for that degree, however, as she realized that her professional calling was performance and choreography.

At the height of her career in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States. The Washington Post called her "dancer Katherine the Great." For almost 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American black dance troupe at that time. Over her long career, she choreographed more than ninety individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology. She also developed the Dunham Technique, a method of movement to support her dance works.

Katherine Mary Dunham was born on June 22, 1909 in a Chicago hospital. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar. Her mother, Fanny June Dunham, who, according to Dunham's memoir, possessed Indian, French Canadian, English, and probably African ancestry, died when Dunham was four years old. She had an older brother, Albert Jr., with whom she had a close relationship. After her mother died, her father left the children with their aunt Lulu on Chicago's South Side. At the time, the South Side of Chicago was experiencing the effects of the Great Migration where Black southerners attempted to escape the Jim Crow South and poverty. Along with the Great Migration, came White flight and her aunt Lulu's business suffered and ultimately closed as a result. This led to a custody battle over Katherine and her brother, brought on by their maternal relatives. This meant neither of the children was able to settle into a home for a few years. However, after her father remarried, Albert Sr. and his new wife, Annette Poindexter Dunham, took in Katherine and her brother. The family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois. There, her father ran a dry-cleaning business.

Dunham became interested in both writing and dance at a young age. In 1921, a short story she wrote when she was 12 years old, called "Come Back to Arizona", was published in volume 2 of The Brownies' Book.

She graduated from Joliet Central High School in 1928, where she played baseball, tennis, basketball, and track; served as vice-president of the French Club, and was on the yearbook staff. In high school she joined the Terpsichorean Club and began to learn a kind of modern dance based on the ideas of Europeans [Émile Jaques-Dalcroze] and [Rudolf von Laban]. At the age of 15, she organized "The Blue Moon Café", a fundraising cabaret to raise money for Brown's Methodist Church in Joliet, where she gave her first public performance. While still a high school student, she opened a private dance school for young black children.

After completing her studies at Joliet Junior College in 1928, Dunham moved to Chicago to join her brother, Albert, at the University of Chicago.

During her time in Chicago, Dunham enjoyed holding social gatherings and inviting visitors to her apartment. Such visitors included ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Redfield, Bronisław Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Fred Eggan, and many others that she met in and around the University of Chicago. After noticing that Katherine enjoyed working and socializing with people, her brother suggested that she study Anthropology. University of Chicago's anthropology department was fairly new and the students were still encouraged to learn aspects of sociology, distinguishing it from other anthropology departments in the US that focused almost exclusively on non-Western peoples. The Anthropology department at Chicago in the 1930s and 40s has been described as holistic, interdisciplinary, with a philosophy of liberal humanism, and principles of racial equality and cultural relativity.