Category Archives: history

Lindy hop is a street dance. And those streets were full of political rallies, protests, and speeches

First, who am I speaking to?

To Black American dancers reading along:
It is insufferable of me to say all this to you. I apologise for whitesplaining your own history.
I am still figuring this all out in my head, so I’m going to write it out.
To everyone else reading along (especially white lindy hoppers and people who are part of a socially powerful group):
We can do better.

Nor am I speaking specifically to teachers with this post. I’m talking to my friends (and strangers) about the way we use history, and specifically Frankie Manning, in lindy hop culture today. More particularly, the way people who are not Black Americans use Black history.
I am endlessly, perpetually enraged and just plain shat off by white ‘dance historians’ who reduce history to a list of dates and ‘events’ they found in a newspaper or journal produced by white businesses for white readers. I am not a historian by trade or training (though I seem to have produced and published a heap of articles and dissertations that look at history and how we ‘make’ it), but I know that if we want to understand what happened in the past, we need to do more than read the accounts of history written by the victors. The victors, in the case of the USA, are white, able bodied cismen. And fuck knows I’m thoroughly sick of reading about them.

Second, I am 100% coming at this issue with an agenda, and that agenda is ‘place Frankie Manning in social and cultural context’. I have that agenda because most of the current ‘talk’ (ie classes, lectures, social media posts, pages on websites, etc etc) present Frankie Manning the way the Ken Burns would: as a singular genius who created great art alone. This is the ‘Great Man’ approach to history.

This approach is a product of 19th Century Angle-Celtic imperialism: the idea that great social and political events (and scientific and cultural and artistic…) are the product of ‘great men’. Heroes. It’s also total bullshit. Creative and scientific and political changes and events are always the product (or one step in a process) of a whole community. You know the line ‘behind every great man is a great woman’? We’ll, it’s more that ‘every great man is embedded in a community that makes his work possible’.

In the case of Frankie Manning, yes he was a talented artist. But he was also the child of a woman called Lucille, who moved north from Florida to New York in the Great Migration. So his world growing up in Harlem was made up of the thousands of other Black Americans who’d moved away from the violence and unemployment of the south. This whole world made him who he was. His work as a professional dancer was shaped by his ‘colleagues’ (other dancers, managers, venue owners, film directors and producers, competition organisers, band leaders, musicians, etc etc etc). His domestic life was shaped by the people he lived with (his single mother, his wives and lovers, his friends), his social life was shaped by his neighbours (a crowd of people living cheek-by-jowl in urban Harlem), his friends’ and friends’ families’ experiences at work, in social clubs, in churches, and in the neighbourhood.

People lived really close together in the overcrowded area, and people came from all over the country with experiences with horrible injustice. They were often the first free people in their family, or even were enslaved in their own life time. To be alive, to travel independently, to make choices about where to live, to be paid for their labour was political. They were political people.

So this is the important bit: you couldn’t live in Harlem in the 20s and 30s without seeing political rallies on the street, hearing speeches on the street about New Negro issues, hearing people (especially women) organising tenant rallies and actions… and so on (this is a good article to learn about how everyday and ordinary politics was in Harlem in the 1910s-40s). The people who moved out of the south had come from places where they couldn’t speak loudly on the street, couldn’t make eye contact with a white person, had no legal recourse when their families were lynched by whites. But in Harlem, the whole philosophy of the ‘New Negro’ was to find a new way of being Black. And that identity was founded absolutely in community.

Politics wasn’t just about joining a political party and voting in elections (though voting rights were at the core of the New Negro movement). It was about neighbours in a building getting together to make their landlord treat them fairly. Or it was about getting WPA funding for a community arts center. Or it was about going to a church meeting and being organised to bring meals to the needy.

You can see the roots of the Black Panthers in all this: political activism was centered absolutely on the community, and on social justice.

Third why teach this in a lindy hop dance class or in a lecture to dancers, or write it on a blog about dance, or in a social media post? Why should modern day lindy hoppers think about Frankie Manning as a man who is part of the Harlem Renaissance?

1. If we tell a story of Frankie Manning as a ‘Great Man’, he becomes a sort of ‘touched by god’ larger-than-life superhero.

2. But if we tell a story of Frankie Manning as part of a community, specifically, the community of the Harlem Renaissance, then we can teach the fact that Black Americans in Harlem (and elsewhere) weren’t just passively accepting slavery or segregation or white oppression. They were actively working to resist oppression. And activism like this has to be collective.

3. This is important for understanding history, but it also provides a model for political action today. The Civil Rights/Freedom movement of the 50s was a product of revolutionary New Negro politics, and reworking of their practices. The Black Panthers were a decentralised community organisation that explicitly drew on the politics of the New Negro that centered education and community care. The Black Lives Matter movement is the next step in that long political and intellectual and community legacy.

Some of the key features of this political heritage are:
– the role of women is centered and acknowledged (women are always present in actions, but not acknowledged in patriarchal movements eg white peace protest in the USA)
– grassroots activism holds everything together. These politics happen in community spaces including homes, church halls, beauty parlours, cafes. Spaces where women and children have power (unlike, for example, a law court)
– when politics and action happen in everyday spaces, everyone is exposed to it everyday
– the ‘street economy’ (eg drug dealers and users, sex workers and consumers, organised crime, etc) becomes an acknowledged part of the process. eg Black trans women during the AIDS crisis (1980s USA) were essential in organising community care and support, and gangsters like Casper Holstein became involved in funding community works.

This all means that we can look at the Harlem Renaissance as a way to understand how we can resist and be politically active today. So instead of thinking ‘oh, I can’t run for a senate seat, I don’t have the money, so I can’t change anything,’ we can think ‘I can organise a fundraiser in my local scene and raise money for the local women’s shelter’ or ‘When I go to the weekend dance event, I can choose the class taught by a Black teacher instead of a white teacher’… and so on.

Frankie as part of the Harlem Renaissance gives us a model for understanding how we can be part of a politicised community today.

I especially like it because it’s a good alternative to the political model offered by white patriarchy in Australia. I don’t want to join a major political party. I want to teach lindy hop in my local club’s games room, and show people a photo of the Silent Parade taken by a Black photographer, to show how the streets of Harlem were literally filled with political actions taken by ordinary people to challenge white violence in other states.

4. It can also show how, even if a person like Frankie Manning didn’t tell stories about politics when he was teaching white people in the 1980s, he was part of a politicised community. If we think of him as a product of the Harlem Renaissance, the short anecdote in his bio where he describes traveling to see Martin Luther King speak as an ordinary thing colleagues in a unionised workplace did makes perfect sense.

It also shows modern, white lindy hoppers that you can be a great artist, or a hardcore adrenaline junky lindy hopper AND go to a political rally with your workmates.

And to address Damon’s point on my fb post:

it seems very much of filling an agenda that doesn’t serve the point of most Lindy Hop related lectures.

Color struck! Telling history in lindy hop classes should be radical

I’m always very annoyed when people begin stories about lindy hop or Frankie Manning with ‘and the Savoy was unsegregated heaven’ or ‘he came out of retirement to …’

We should begin with “Lucille Manning left Florida and the violent racism of the south in 1917, moving north to Harlem, New York. She found a Harlem in the grip of social and creative revolution, as six million Black Americans just like her left the south for the promise of northern cities.”

And then there should be a bit about the Harlem Renaissance, and what it was like to be living in Harlem between the 1910s and 1940s. Not the stuff about how heavenly the Savoy was. The stuff about the exciting political activism, floods of books and magazines and journals, weekly public speeches on modern issues in the street, the importance of libraries and community arts centers, and the way a small part of a big city was stuffed full of creative people inspired by the New Negro movement. And how the drugs and drink and queer sex and cross dressing and sex work were as important to the street economy and community as the women who held it all together. The stuff about the Savoy can come after all that. The five thousand people who came through its doors each night were also book sellers and activists and librarians and teachers and truck drivers and unionists.

Let’s stop telling bullshit stories about Great Men. That’s white man kenburns bullshit. Black history is about matriarchal communities, collective action, and thousands of silent Black Americans walking down Fifth Avenue to protest white racial violence. It is fierce political activism, and Zora Neal Hurston tossing a red feather boa over her shoulder and declaiming “Color struck!” as she swanned into a room.

James van der Zee’s portrait ‘Beau of the Ball’ 1926. van der Zee was a prolific and very famous photographer of the Harlem Renaissance (and following decades).


The magazine ‘Fire!!: Devoted to Younger Negro Artists’ included the (super gay) story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade, A Novel, Part I,” by out queer author Richard Bruce Nugent in its only issue (1926). Wallace Thurman, another out queer man also published a piece in the magazine. As did Langston Hughs (who was sexually ambiguous). This magazine featured the hot and the new of the younger generation of Harlem Renassaisance artists, who called themselves the ‘Niggerati’. The name was designed to shock. You can read the magazine here.

Sid Grossman 1939 Harlem News stand

Footage of the Silent Parade, 28 March 1917.
The protest was a collaboration between a number of civic and political groups including NAACP, church groups, etc, and it was explicitly designed to call attention to the lynchings in the south.
This is the important part: Black southerners didn’t just ‘flee north’. They went north, got organised, and got out on the fucking street in the thousands.
Lynching was not criminalised in the US until 2022. Lynchings of Black Americans continue today.

Harlem Community Arts Center 1939

The Harlem Community Arts Center was founded in 1937, and funded by the WPA. It was run by Augusta Savage and then Gwendolyn Bennett. 70,592 people attended activities at the center in its first 16 months. Why so many? I haven’t looked up the facts on that yet (some of the links are broken and I’m worried the sources have been purged by the Trump govt). But it’s no doubt a combination of a very crowded neighbourhood, the high profile of the center and its members, a multicultural staff and membership, services for kids and adults, and just a big old interest in the arts and culture in Harlem itself. Harlem folk like a show, I guess.

I am excited about Harlem Renaissance again because I’ve just listened to this podcast: Harlem is Everywhere. It’s very accessible, and gives lots of good info, all in shortish episodes.

I also saw this film, ‘once upon a time in harlem’ at the SFF this weekend.
I spent quite a bit of that film with my mouth hanging open. The photographs I’d shown in my film talk the other day were taken by the man on the screen, James van der Zee, talking about living in Harlem in the 20s and 30s.
And there’s Eubie Blake talking about writing Shuffle Along with Noble Sissle. And there’s NOBLE SISSLE TALKING ABOUT WRITING THE PLAY AND I NEARLY EXPLODE.
This film made it clear how important women and collectivism were to Harlem in the 20s-40s. Black women librarians managing the building where writers like Langston Hughes wrote. Black women organising the parties and dinners and salons where these people got together and talked and argued and thought. Augusta Savage running the Harlem Community Art Center. Iolanthe Sydney, a Black woman renting the ‘Niggerati Manor’ to young radical artists very cheaply because she wanted to support the arts.

African diaspora and language in lindy hop

Odysseus Bailer has recently posted an interesting request on a number of facebook pages and groups. His piece begins”The Phrase “Black Dance”, “Black music and dance”, “Black Culture” is not the same as “Black American Music and Dance”, “Black American Culture”” and continues to make some interesting points.
His key argument (to paraphrase clumsily) is that we should stop staying ‘Black dance’ and start saying ‘Black American dance’ because the dances from African American communities are unique and distinct from the dances created by and in other communities in the African diaspora.

I agree with this.

There have been some really interesting comments by other Black dancers, DJs, and organisers, and I do recommend taking the time to read through all these discussions. Some of the comments are very, very clever. Kenneth Shipp asks us why do we need to specify Black American?

I mean sure, you can make this distinction, but the etymology and history of Black / Negro in Western culture directly points to Black American culture as a direct line to enslavement (to mark a difference from African nations and parts of the diaspora) and marks cultural progress (like when Washington and DuBois argued for capitalizing Negro, and various popular changes through the centuries, like Afro vs African).
…
My question, given this history: what would functionally change if we explicitly said Black American?

One of the other really interesting comments is along the lines of ‘I don’t think of myself as African American… I am Black, or Black American’. A few people made this comment. I thought this was super interesting to see. And it’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed in the Teaching Hard History podcast: the speakers are very much invested in the idea of a United States of America that is their country as well. It’s quite different to the discussions by Aboriginal Australians who actively reject the idea of a single country ‘Australia’. But I guess that’s one of the key differences between First Nations people’s sense of nation and belonging and Black American sense of nation. And my own racism is indubitably coming out there, if I just assume that these two very different groups of people would think about nation in the same way! Shame on me!

A lot of white lindy hoppers really like to draw that ‘lindy hop family tree’ as rooted in Africa, and to insist on that connection with Africa. I say ‘Africa’ deliberately, as I’ve seen white dancers argue for learning all sorts of dances from different African countries and traditions, rather than from the West African nations that lost people to white kidnappers and slavery. It seems odd to me to imply that ‘any African dance’ will do. It makes the cultural distinctions between African countries disappear; it makes Africa that ‘dark continent’ all over again.
But I’m not 100% sure what I think about this right now. I need to think more about it. Especially since we can definitely argue that lindy hop might have more in common with dances of…. say, Uganda, than the folk dances of Scotland!

Anyway, of course I chimed in. One thing I saw in some white people’s comments was what seems to be a misunderstanding of the concept of the African diaspora. So I wrote a stupid long comment. I’ve put it here, because writing it helped me put together what I’ve learn listening to the excellent Teaching Hard History Podcast, reading up about 70s and 80s lindy hop, and thinking about the different experiences of Black American and Black British lindy hoppers in that period. And how the Black women on both sides of the Atlantic have been quietly erased from modern lindy hop history.

I’m going to preface this comment with explaining who I am. When we pretend we are writing objectively, we make our own privilege disappear. It’s important that I always remember the privilege I was born with, and to some extent recreate every day. Despite my best efforts.

I am a white, middle class, able bodied woman living in a big city (Sydney/Warane) in Australia. I was born in England, and emigrated here with my family in 1982, after living in Fiji. I chose to become an Australian citizen in the mid 1990s, and have dual British/Australian citizenship. I think I’m the only one in my family who is (my brother and parents are permanent residents with British citizenship). My family chose to come to Australia, and our emigration was relatively easy because we are white, middle class, and British. You could say that we are part of a British diaspora, though we have always lived in British colonies (my father is Welsh and lived in Gibraltar and Kenya as a child and teen).

Friends (especially white people like me) reading along who aren’t familiar with the phrase ‘African diaspora’:
In really simple terms, it means people who are from or descended from people born in Africa. It’s usually applied to these people who no longer live in Africa. So those people can live anywhere in the world.

First important thing: there are 54 African countries, each has distinct languages and cultures. They were/are politically and culturally sophisticated with impressive architecture, systems of mathematics and philosophy, complex crafts and technologies, some of the oldest libraries in the world, etc etc. In many cases colonisation by European nations fucked shit up real bad.

Second important thing: people of African descent living outside Africa
a) may have chosen to emigrate,
b) may be refugees who didn’t want to leave but had to flee,
c) my be or have been enslaved people who were kidnapped and transported to another country,
d) may be the descended from enslaved people.

Third important thing: We can’t talk about the African diaspora without talking about European colonialism and slavery.

The empires of countries like England, Spain, Netherlands, etc were dependent on the labour of enslaved people. Slavery still happens today in many countries. The economic power of countries like England today were built on slavery. White people like me, who were born in England and live in Australia still benefit from the enslaving, trafficking, and labour of African people during the past few centuries. My country is rich because of slavery in the British empire.

Slavery involves:
a) humans being treated as objects to be bought and sold;
b) the labour of these people (ie unpaid work);
c) and usually involves racism: believing that humans can be divided up into ‘races’, and that some of these races are less advanced than others. Sometimes people are enslaved because they belong to a different caste, religion, or ethnic group. Note: the idea of ‘race’ is a white concept. The idea of being ‘half-caste’, etc, is a white concept invented to justify enslaving some people and not others.

When we talk about the USA (where lindy hop began), we have to talk about the way people from mostly west African countries were kidnapped and transported to then North American colon(ies) by white traders. The USA was built on the labour of enslaved people and the oppression (and enslaving) of Indigenous people who were there first. After emancipation (the ‘ending’ of slavery in the USA), there were African Americans in the Freedom Movement who explored the idea of ‘returning’ to Africa. That’s a whole other topic, and worth researching.

But the USA is also home to Africans who came to the country voluntarily in the last century or so. Things get more complicated when we talk about people of African descent who migrated to the USA voluntarily, but were descended from Africans who were enslaved in other countries. eg Haitians. If you’re a fan of hip hop, the Fugees are a good example of artists of Haitian descent who were born in Haiti, or born in the USA to Haitian parents. Haiti was a Spanish colony, and African people were kidnapped and transported to Haiti as a source of labour.

There are also people of African descent living throughout Europe (eg France is home to the largest population of people of African descent). Some of them are the descendants of free Africans who travelled to Europe at some point in the last few centuries. Some are descendants of Africans enslaved by Europeans and transported to Europe.
Some of them migrated to Europe during the 20th century from European colonies which had enslaved populations of African people.
When we talk about the ‘Windrush generation’ of Black British people, we are talking about a generation of people who emigrated to the UK on boats like the Windrush from the 1940s. As citizens of the British colonies in the Caribbean (called the ‘British West Indies’ at the time), they were entitled to British citizenship, and came to the UK for work. They were often descendants of African people enslaved by the British and transported to the Caribbean.

And of course, there are African migrants in lots of other countries. eg Australia has more African migrants than African American migrants. Some of these are refugees who’d like to return to their homelands, some are migrants who’d like to stay. My country has always been really shit in the way it treats non-white migrants.
Australia is also home to people who are descended from people who were enslaved in other countries (eg Indians who were enslaved in Fiji by the British), Pacific Islanders who were kidnapped by white men and transported to Australia to work on farms, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were enslaved by white farmers and families in towns.

As you can see, people of the African diaspora have some things in common, but the African experience in France in the 1980s is not the same as the African experience in the USA in the 1700s. It’s important to know and remember these differences. Just as Europe is made up of lots of cultures and people, Africa, and the African diaspora is made of of lots of cultures and people.

Lindy hop is the product of African American cultures and experiences.

The word ‘Black’ became a word of power for African Americans in the Freedom Movement in the 1960s. It is a word of pride and political identity.
It’s also used by people of African descent in other countries in the same way: a political and cultural identity.
It’s also used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia (though spelt ‘Blak’), in much the same way.
And it’s used by people of other cultures as a physical descriptor (eg having black skin) or political identity. This is where things get more complicated and culturally specific, so I’ll leave it there.

I think that Odysseus is asking that when we teach lindy hop (a Black American/African American dance) we refine our use of the phrase ‘Black’ with the word ‘American’, to distinguish the African American experience from the experience of people of the African diaspora in other countries.

The term ‘Black’ has been problematic in the past, and it has been a word of power in other moments. When I speak to dance friends today, I try to use the term they prefer. African American, Black, Black American. It’s just polite.

NB I say ‘Freedom Movement’ instead of ‘Civil Rights Movement’ after hearing Ruby Sales explaining the difference.

I’ve just listened to this episode of Teaching Hard History, “Listen, Look and Learn: Using Primary Sources to Teach the Freedom Struggle” and it’s fantastic.

If you follow the SNCC Digital Gateway to the Black Power entry, you can learn about the way the word ‘Black’ was used during the 1960s in an empowering way.

If you’re researching dance and music history of your local area, this ep of Teaching Hard History is an invaluable resource. They talk about how to use primary sources (eg oral histories and interviews), how to record them, how to archive them.

It’s been really cool to listen to this podcast, then think about the discussions people are having about the role of Frankie Manning in lindy hop history this week. I have been thinking more lately that the latest generation of white lindy hoppers (eg people who started in the last ten years) haven’t been exposed to all the oral histories (ie stories told by OGs) that I have through the last 30 years. Oral histories are really powerful because they personalise history. And a story well told is particularly powerful.

NB I use the word ‘white’ rather than ‘European’, because whiteness is a political and ideological concept, and ‘European’ has more to do with geography. I also think that ‘European’ is problematic because there are plenty of European peoples who experience extreme disadvantage and oppression (hello, Ukraine).

When we talk about whiteness in the context of slavery and racism, we give ourselves a pathway to deconstructing the power and privilege of people who may have pale skin, but more importantly, have economic and social power.

Saturday is class squee day!

Today was week 1 of our lindy hop class block, and we had a lovely time doing swing outs and break steps and jazz and stuff. I squeed when they did their first swing outs. Does it ever get old? No. They always feel the feelings when they get out there.

After the class I did a little show and tell with photos and videos. The goal was to explain who Frankie Manning was, and what it was like in Harlem in the 20s and 30s.
I really wanted to position Frankie and the other lindy hoppers as part of that Harlem community. Not individual superheroes. People who were part of a neighbourhood.
So I had photos and vids of dancing and music and community activism and poetry and theatre and art and the New Negro movement and renters’ unions and Harlem Renaissance and clubs and rent parties. I used a mix of photos of people and of huge bright paintings, videos, and gifs.

And videos of people doing mad air steps and swinging out.

Things that were cool:

  • we did it straight after week 1 class of the new beginner lindy hop block. Peeps were tired, but also relaxed and feeling happy and friendly.
  • we got to sit down and see the stuff we’d learnt in class done by the kings and queens
  • we all got to chat and get to know each other in a less formal environment. I used a script with some bits I’d read out (eg quotes from Frankie’s book), but mostly I used a casual chatty style. Because of the crew (my old friends, a bunch of rowdy friends, relaxed happy people) they interrupted to ask questions and point stuff out. PERFECT.

I strongly recommend doing a little film session like this with your students, in their class space. Helped develop cohort, really let them see what lindy hop was like danced by people like Frankie Manning, let them see who the people we talk about look like, etc etc.
I’d keep it to a shorter length (we took about 40 minutes), and I’d aim for a chatty relaxed style that keeps them engaged, rather than a long formal lecture where they fall asleep.

My favourite part was their reactions to the videos!
They’d laugh at stuff I’ve seen other people laugh at – pecking, weird crazy leg stuff, etc. They’d ooh and aaah at aerials.

And a really cool thing – I showed them footage of Frankie teaching a lindy hop class, because I wanted them to see how he taught, and the effect it had on people in the room. They all reacted the same way the people in the class in the video reacted! Laughing, oohing and ahhing, engaging. It was really cool to see.

Anyway, there’s a pic of some of the crew at the top of this post. After this session I found a HUGE projection screen in the storage room. Better buy a projector, aye?

Community vibes – how do you grow a crew?

Ah, that most perennial of questions.

I’ve recently started teaching lindy hop again, and while mostly it’s been a lot easier than when I first set up a business and class, there are the same usual challenges: how to get students to stay for the whole block, how to be welcoming without making it weird, how to balance the work with the fun for me.
I actually feel ok about the teaching itself, and the marketing and promotion side of things. The interesting bit for me is figuring out where I, my class, and the peeps in my class fit into the bigger local scene. How and when do I look at running social dancing? How do I stop my social dancing being some weird stand alone thing instead of a natural progression from classes? How do I make the right conditions for community?

Or as I said to my friend, it’s like I’m asking myself, “How do I make friends?!” I am not a shy person. I should know this. But I’m curious to see how other people do this.

What are the things about your club/class/party/crew that make it fun and somewhere people want to be?

I know from experience that the way to build a cohort and a little group of peeps is to use my social skills so they can make friends. Welcome everyone individually. Learn names. Ask them about themselves. Drinks and snacks after classes, time to talk and make friends in class. Spend more time on making connections with the students who come to class than with trying to sell classes to people who haven’t come.

Ideally, I’d like to just have them all get into trying out ‘social dancing’ ie, just dancing, in the space right after class. And also taking time to eat snacks (the snack table is where people chat), have a drink, get to know each other. The dancing part is lovely, but the getting to know each other part is essential.

Anyway, Julia Loving just put me onto this fantastic panel session they did in NY in 2019. They spend a bunch of time in the question time talking about how to get young folk, especially young Black folk into lindy hop. Once again, white girl me should be listening to Black elders to learn. The things I see and hear them say:

  • Providing food, Ronald Jones says. A basket of chicken for some kids in a basement. A buffet dinner in the room where the panel is held. This makes complete cultural sense to me from my family and background.
  • Respect the young people, Ronald says. Don’t treat them like babies or fools. Treat them like thinking, responsible people.
  • If you’re a young person, sit with the elders, Mickey Davidson demonstrates. Listen to them, learn from them, earn their respect. ie show respect. And you’ll be gradually included.
  • Play music at the party.
  • Make your gig physically accessible (ie not way over the outside of town).
  • Make some jokes, laugh at some jokes.
  • If someone’s talking to you (whether it’s in a mic on a stage or at the snack table), make the active listening noises: hello! Oh yeah! Whaat? The Black audience listening to the panel session demonstrate. We don’t like a silent, stiff crowd, right?

Black women in lindy hop: getting shit done

After doing a bunch of reading and digging, these are some of the important things I’ve learnt about lindy hop in the 1970s and 1980s.

The New York Swing Dance Society doesn’t get the props it deserves for running parties that got people out and dancing (including Frankie and Norma and other OGs).

Community spaces – bars, clubs, church halls, social clubs, basements – were where lindy hop lived during these decades. It didn’t die. It was busy.

Norma Miller wearing her Menton Buck Clayton Hat, Photograph by Nancy Miller Elliot, Courtesy Norma Miller

Norma Miller was really important. She was the sort of person who’d make sure people like Frankie went out to dance to a band (1983), and got a whole gang of OGs together for a party at Sandra Cameron’s studio (1983).

“In April 1983, at Norma’s suggestion, Larry Schultz and his wife, Sandra Cameron, had invited about thirty Savoy Lindy Hoppers to a little get-together at their dance studio. It was wonderful to see everybody, and we had a ball catching up and dancing with each other. We were all out there clowinging around, trying to remember our old routines.” (p225 Frankie Bio)

She put on shows with OGs starring in the early to mid 80s, she trained up new Black dancers. She did that thing that still holds lindy hop (and communities!) together today: she introduced people to each other.

Mama Lu Parks was another of those important women, putting on gigs, running performance groups, getting shit done.

The stories I’ve heard in the past about the 1980s were mostly about white men ‘discovering’ Frankie or Al Minns or Norma and convincing them to ‘come out of retirement’. But it was Black women who were keeping relationships alive, bringing people together, and getting shit done. AS PER USUAL.

Frankie Manning and politics

I’m checking some details in Frankie Manning’s biography, and there’s a section where he writes:

I always agreed with Martin Luther King’s point of view. In 1963, a whole group of us from the Postal Workers Union went down by bus to the rally in Washington, D.C. to support him. When I heard him give his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, I was very moved.” (pg 218)

I’ve heard white lindy hoppers argue that Frankie wasn’t political*. That’s patently bullshit. He was a union member. He went to Washington to support King. It’s also really important to remember that the US Postal Service was (and is) an important site for Black organising and grassroots politics. Margot Lee Shetterly talks about this in her book Hidden Figures, noting the path from postal service to aeronautics for Black workers and thinkers.

And of course he choreographed and performed in A BIOGRAPHCICAL FILM ABOUT MALCOLM X. A film that directly visually referenced multiple films that starred Manning and his peers.**

I also want to point out that Frankie didn’t ‘stop dancing’ in the 1950s. He mostly retired from professional dancing, but of course he kept on dancing! Parties, dances, band gigs… all the usual places where vernacular dance lives.

References

*What do I mean by ‘political’?
On one level, it’s referring to the mechanics and institutions of a political systems – parties, voting, electoral systems, unions, politicians.
But that’s the very simplest level.
If we define ‘politics’ as being the relationships of power between people, things get a lot more interesting. This is the sort of definition used by feminist and anti-racist activists and scholars.
So ‘politics’ can expand to include the social relationships between adults and children, the collectivist philosophies of unions, the uses of power between men and women, and so on.
Every time Frankie said ‘Think of your partner as a queen’, he was making a political statement: treat your partner like royalty. Show your respect by bowing. Obviously he didn’t think they were actually a member of a royal family; this was about defining relationships between men and women as one of mutual respect, where men invite women to be powerful and love it.

** If you compare the soundie/short film Keep Punchin’ with the scenes in the ballroom in Malcolm X you’ll see characters and narrative elements from the soundie in Spike Lee’s film. This is one of the clever things about Lee’s films: he uses archival material as inspiration, but often also shows them on-screen during the films. I am a huge fan of his films.

AI, slavery, and being annoying

The thing about the environmental impact of AI data centers (they have huge electricity and water requirements), is that there were already big issues with data centers before AI became a popular media topic. ‘AI’ (as a topic) just pushed it to the public consciousness.
‘AI’ is really just bigger, smarter computers. And we’ve been heading towards bigger, smarter computers for decades.

It’s easy to hate on AI for killing jobs for creatives, or for making the world a little more boring. But the thing that I’m most concerned about is the way the writing that AI does (for university essays or newspapers or whatevs) is not insightful or brilliant.

‘AI’ is really just a computer reading a heap of things, observing patterns, and then making some informed guesses about the right answers. It doesn’t make intuitive leaps, it’s not creative, and it’s not thinking critically. So you don’t get new ideas. It could be useful for doing things like generating a literature review, but it’s not going to take the ideas from that literature review and apply it to real world situations or real people.

I read an article recently where they were discussing a study on the types of writing AI generated essays produce (sorry I can’t remember the reference). They found that the sort of writing produced by AI tended to preserve the status quo. It didn’t do anything radical, it didn’t have new ideas, it didn’t critically engage with the ideas in the material it assessed.

In other words (speaking as a feminist cultural studies scholar), the students using AI to write their essays are not going to go on and fucking fight the man. Their thinking and writing will not be radical.

Not a huge surprise for feminists who’ve been critical of university-based gender studies. Masters tools, masters house and all that.
The other issue that a lot of us who have been doing creative work for a job (copywriters!) is that the work we do will be done by computers. Again, not a new idea. But if we pull back a bit and look at the bigger cultural landscape, we can see that this change in labour practices is happening all over the place. Companies like Amazon have done a very good job of union busting, destroying collectivism, and reducing workers to slaves. I wish it was an exaggeration.

Modern day slavery is something women and people of colour experience in various contexts – sex work, garment manufacturing, and most tellingly, prison work.

That last one has been bothering me this week. ICE rampaging through fields and factories and kidnapping workers to incarcerate them is one very effective way of developing an enslaved workforce. Prison detainees work for no pay, or for a stunningly low rate. Prisons are increasingly privately run.

All of this has been bothering me since I listened to the first two episodes of the Teaching Hard History podcast. These eps look at the role of slavery in the civil war. I was surprised to hear that many white Americans assume that the civil war was about states’ rights. I’d just figured it was about the north and south arguing about ending slavery. These two eps make it super clear that it’s about the role of slavery in the pre civil war economy. Enslaved people = free labour. Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, people were paid if they ‘captured’ ‘escaped’ slaves. This Law was passed by the US congress, and was one of those issues contributing to the ‘states’ rights’ arguments.

It gets a bit complicated (the podcast is easy to understand though), but it helps understand how ICE and the Trump’s determination to kidnap Black and brown people contributes to an economy which has _always_ involved slavery (from ridiculously low basic wages to indenture and the powers of businesses like Amazon).

Reassuringly (and this is why we teach history), the introduction of the Fugitive Slave Act was met by very angry crowds of citizens. And as the podcast points out, the civil war and the ending of slavery wasn’t something that was done ‘for’ or ‘to’ Black Americans. It was something they actively participated in. In other words: white Americans, you need to pay attention to Black history if you want to fight this shit.

And Australia? Our own history of slavery (from Pacific Islanders in cane fields to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders workers in white homes and on white farms) makes it clear that we white people are ok with slavery.

Incidentally (and to bring me back to my original point), the types of connections I’m making here (looking at social and economic and cultural patterns) to critique the uses of power and technology are things a computer can’t do. So of course it makes sense for a company like Amazon to embrace AI technology.

It’s important to pay attention to the details, and to keep track of those niggling little feelings you have that something isn’t quite adding up. Ask questions. Be annoying.

The revivalist narrative will not die.

I keep coming across white organisations telling a ‘history’ of lindy hop that gives ‘the revival’ pride of place. ie white people claiming the modern lindy hop world as their own altruistic work.
So the term ‘revival’ is problematic because it implies that lindy hop was dead (replaced by rock and roll and/or bebop) before white people came along and brought it back to life. In this narrative, white people are heroes for saving ‘this wonderful dance’ and bringing it back to life.

Black people are totally absent from this story, except as venerable elders who teach eager white people. The white people are also credited with bringing these elders ‘out of retirement’ and back to the dance floor.
It’s all very problematic.

1. Lindy hop wasn’t dead. There’s a whole family of Black social partner dances that are thriving (Tena Morales’ event the International Swing Dance Championships showcases them every year, but white people don’t go to that and aren’t involved, so it must not exist).

2. Because it wasn’t dead, it didn’t need reviving. Declaring lindy hop ‘terra nullius’ (ie no people living in this territory) was white people giving themselves permission to take lindy hop. So the white people who ‘went looking’ for Black elders were pretty much just out on a bit of a colonial expedition. Just like Captain Cook expanding the British Empire, ‘discovering’ a huge big southern continent (‘Australia’).

3. Those Black elders, like Frankie Manning and Norma Miller and so on were still dancing, but in their families and homes and community spaces. Black spaces, to which white people did not have access. The story told most often about Frankie Manning, that his working in the post office was somehow less important or lower status than his dance career is classist and racist. The US Postal Service has a long history as an important employer and union locus for Black communities. It was good, solid work. Norma, of course, was running a dance business (managing troupes), Mama Lou Parkes was still dancing professionally… and so on.

4. The Black dancers who were involved in lindy hop in the 1980s tend to disappear in these revivalist narratives. Angela Andrew and other Black women have lots to say about the number of Black dancers out there lindy hopping in the 1980s, but they somehow disappear when white people tell the stories.

5. The white ‘ownership’ (appropriation) of Black lindy hop in that 1980s period is not only about selling places in classes and workshops (and thereby ‘creating community’ via economic relationships), but also about the exploitation of Black dancers working for white troupe managers (we won’t go into some of the more troubling accounts from that period).

RE the USPS:
I came across references to the importance of the postal service in Hidden Figures and the way it provided a pathway to the space program for Black women (SUCH a good book).

There’s also Philip F. Rubio’s book ‘There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality’ (which I haven’t read, but have read _about_.
This all makes the US govt’s cuts to the USPS a matter of institutional racism and white supremacy, rather than a push for smaller government generally (though I’d argue the two are the same thing).

The more I learn about the USPS as a site for unionising, civil rights activism and Black community empowerment, the more troubled I am by white histories of lindy hop that devalue the USPS in Manning’s life. If the civil rights elements of this workplace are ignored, then white ‘historians’ can continue with their bullshit about ‘Frankie never talked about racism in lindy hop, so it didn’t happen’. I’d say that Frankie, as with any other Black worker in America then and now, was very much aware of racism in the entertainment industry and in America generally, and was very careful about what he said to white people about it, and when.

As with the workers who continue to go back to places like Herrang, despite unsafe or inequitable working environments, when you don’t have the financial and personal safety of white privilege, you have fewer choices about the work you can do. And teaching middle class white kids to lindy hop might have suited Manning.

Black European Dancers

I’ve just realised I missed the latest BlackLindy HoppersFund intensive (BOOO) so i thought I’d share this here, so we can all have a look. There are two more left: Dee Daniels Locke on the 30th April, and then Helena Kanini Kiirur on the 25th June.

We all love Dee, right (yes), and if you haven’t seen Helena dance, you need to follow her on instagram right now. RIGHT now.

Anyway, BLHF is one of the very few organisations in the lindy hopping world which hires only Black artists (and pays them real money, not ‘exposure’), and makes it easier for Black dancers to attend the workshops. They are fucking legit on this. And intensives (ie workshops) are really top shelf. I’ve only managed to be involved in three, but they are just the best.
As a student, I had fun, but as a teacher, I learnt that Black teachers work in a different way. And I learnt a lot about these approaches to teaching. If you’ve been following that recent conversation we had in this group about whether a teaching method can be anti-racist, you’ll find these BLHF sessions really interesting. Because they _are_ the definition of anti-racism work.

This is Helena’s ig account. This video blew my mind. It’s such a clear example of how the history of Black dance lives in Black bodies and Black dance _today_. You can’t talk about lindy hop without talking about contemporary Black culture.

I was sorry to see I’d missed Trisha Sewell’s class on lovers’ rock. I got interested in lovers rock (which is a subgenre of reggae) after watching Steve McQueen’s brilliant film ‘Lovers’ Rock’ in his Small Axe series.

This series about Black Music in Europe talks about lovers rock in the UK.

risha is a Black British dancer. She and other female Black British dancers (including people like Angela ‘Cookie’ Andrews) are often left out of stories about lindy hop in the UK. Angela is a truly great dancer. Watching her in this, I just can’t look away. She. Is. So. Good.

Oh, and because there’s MORE, here is a video we all know and love. Featuring Angela and Dee. Cookie told me that she was _judging_ the contest, but just couldn’t help getting in there.