When you're young, you just go ahead with life. Now that we're older, you look back and think, my goodness, that's quite an interesting story there. The story is of a young woman who danced a dream that collided with one of the most turbulent times in America's history and how she became a symbol of the era. Although Raven Wilkinson danced with ballerinas whose names are far more famous than hers, in many ways her accomplishments outdid them all. On the afternoon of November 23, 1956, Three buses pulled into the city of Montgomery, Alabama.
On board, the Ballet Rouge de Monte Carlo. As we drove into the town, the streets were just covered with these sheets and hoods darting here and there, masses and crowds of them, and the traffic was all stopped up because they were in the middle of the street. There on the side was a Klan rally.
They want to throw... white children and colored children into the belting part of integration, out of which will come a conglomerated, ballada, mongrel class of people. Both races will be destroyed in such a movement. On the bus that day was a young ballet dancer from New York City, the first black member of an American ballet company, and the first to tour the country, Raven Wilkinson. So we got to the hotel, and we had to eat something before going to the theater, so we went in the hotel dining room.
The hotel dining room was just full that day. All these people that looked like a lot of families, of these nice people sitting there eating so nicely and quietly, and I did notice they looked a little kind of frayed and rural, and the men looked kind of Sears Roebuck-y suits, and I thought, well, what nice... People, and then as I went to sit down at the chair at my table, as I pulled it out, I looked at the chair that was empty for the next table.
It wasn't empty, it was piled up with gowns and hoods. And I realized that all these were Klan people in the dining room having lunch. And I sat down, I just looked at them and I thought, now isn't that something?
These people, they love their children, they're family people. They'll get up and they'll put those hoods and those gowns on and they can go out and hate people and kill people. And I said, you know, it just made me realize how human nature is so strange.
It's so strange. Two years earlier, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that segregation of public schools solely on the basis of race was unconstitutional. The landmark case, Brown v. The Board of Education, said the separate-but-equal doctrine had no place in public education. The South reacted. Jim Crow laws, insisting on separate-but-equal restaurants, buses, and other public spaces, still existed.
When the Ballets Rouges arrived, Montgomery was in the final days of the bus boycott Rosa Parks had started 32 months earlier. And yet, it would be another eight years before the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination. In the 40s when I was growing up, of course, racism was so strong. And I remember even in New York, my mother was an exquisite lady, very, very beautiful. People always thought we were something.
They never dreamed we were what we were. They thought we were Indonesian or Spanish or something exotic. And they were forever asking.
And of course they'd look at my mother and say, well, what are you? And, excuse me, could you tell me what you are? And my mother would say, I'm American. And they'd go, oh, you know, I mean, it never answered the question, but they accepted it. And much to my mother's...
There's bafflement, and she disagreed with this, and my grandmother, too, two southern ladies. Their granddaughter and their daughter, when asked what she is, tells people what she is, you know. And in those days, like in the North, you said when people asked you, well, what are you? I would say, well, I'm colored.
Wilkinson was born in 1935 in New York City. Her father was a dentist, her mother a homemaker who involved herself in charity work. Wilkinson spent her first 13 years living in the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem, once home to residents like poet County Cullen, jazz musician Fletcher Henderson, and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois. A baby of the Harlem Renaissance, Wilkinson knew at a young age she wanted to be a ballerina.
I was five. My mother took me to see, down in city center, Ballet Rooms to Monte Carlo. It was Coppelia and Franklin and D'Anelian.
were the dancers. Oh, I just thought, are these people real? You know, I couldn't...
How they moved, and the sense of the theater when the house lights go down and the lights go up on a gold curtain, and then the conductor raises that baton, and there's a moment of just complete... like suspension and then he brings it down and the drum rolls into this overture this rollicking resulter and it was all too much for someone five i just sat in the chair and cried because it was overwhelming it was a cry i just didn't know what else to do my mother looked at me she said are you all right i mean i think she thought i was going to be laughing or smiling but i said yes it was just so beautiful inspired Wilkinson started taking ballet classes at age nine at the Svoboda School in Manhattan. She was the only black student.
New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson says, for a black female dancer, classical ballet was a world virtually impossible to break into. And there was always this notion or this fear that if we had dancers of... Many different kinds of skin complexion in a row together, they would visually cancel each other out or jar or contradict with each other.
In spite of this bias, Wilkinson kept on. When she was 17, her school was bought by the owner of the company that first moved her to dance. His name? Sergei Denim.
The company? The Ballets Rouges de Monte Carlo. I auditioned for two years to get in the group and didn't make it.
In... and get taken. Days before her third audition, a friend at this school told Wilkinson it was hopeless. Her race was an insurmountable barrier. It's not something you don't know, you know, it's always back there and you're walking around with this shadow, you want to be in the ballet so much, and I thought, oh my god, here it is, it's come.
So I went home and I thought to myself, you know, I'm going to go ahead and take it. I'm not going to turn around and walk away. It's going to have to be proven to me, even if I have to keep patting my head against the stone wall, I'm going to keep trying no matter what. Keep trying, keep on, keep on, keep on. In spite of her friend's advice, Wilkinson did take the audition.
We were sitting out there in the room waiting. You had to wait until all the groups had gone in and they'd auditioned everybody. Then they came back out and called us back in by name, one by one.
They called Raven Wilkinson. I went back in the room, and Sergei Denim, who was the director and head of Ballet Russe, said, this Russian gentleman, he said, and how would you like to be in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo? And I was like, I said yes. Wilkinson joined the Corps de Ballet, the ensemble performers who make up the backbone of the company. And so began...
life on the road. These were not easy tours. Lynn Garofola is a dance historian and author. She says the company's tours were not as glamorous as they appeared. If you remember the core, it wasn't so terrific.
Night after night of one night stand performances day in day out week after week. In his seminal book on the Ballet Rouge de Monte Carlo titled The One and Only, Jack Anderson describes the rigor this touring company demanded of its dancers. But in the old days, touring was expected.
Some of the dancers have said they never knew where they were. You know, it was on the bus at 8 in the morning. It was traveling all day.
It was getting out and rehearsing. It was doing the performance until after 11 or 11.30. Then you would go home and have to wash tights and eat or something, and you have to start.
Oh, you just got tired. We got off that bus, and we went, and you had to hold on to a trunk. There were no bars.
And sometimes there was nobody to give you a class. And indeed, I wonder if today's dancers would actually rebel, literally rebel against this. But that was your training.
And even if you were tired and you thought, how am I going to get through it, you still loved it. Because it was expensive to tour, With elaborate sets, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo's repertoire was limited, but the company was expert at making virtue of necessity. They knew how to put on a show. They knew how to put on a show of dancing.
Audiences loved what the company referred to as its ham-and-eggs program, a selection of ballets that were light on sets and big on showmanship. Ballets like the exotic, harem-themed Scheherazade, the classical favorite Les Sylphides, and the crowd-pleaser Gayete Parisienne. As it was called in Hollywood, the Gay Parisian. It's filled with romance and frou-frou and lots of can-cans.
The can-can in Guériti, Parisienne, some people thought was naughty too. And, you know, a lot of women kicking their legs up and their skirts going up. Well, maybe in Podunk, North Dakota, that did strike people as naughty. We had a fast change. What you had to do is pre-set.
We had, and the thing is you were perspiring, so getting clothes on a perspiring body, fast, sometimes very hard. But we had net stockings, so we had them rolled up beside each other, ready to just put on. Of course, the dresses were there and held.
Then we had a garter, because that was the can-can thing, and you had to get these stockings up get the garter, you had to get the pants on, you get the dress on, you get the gloves on, you had to get the hat, the little piece fixed on the head, but you had to get out of the other stuff first. And it was like so fast and you were going on right before you could hardly get your hat on. And we got out on this on the stage and did that.
As Wilkinson matured as a dancer, Denham cast her in soloist roles. He seems to have been Pretty colorblind in terms of the casting of her. She's cast throughout the repertory. She is not just put into roles that are in some way exotic. My first solo part, the waltz.
in Lesotho. I loved it. I loved Lesotho, period. It shows a very decent side of him, not only because he hired her, but because he kept rehiring her, especially when it became clear.
that she could not tour throughout the South. As the integration struggles increased, so did resentment against blacks increase, and so then, of course, the trouble began. With the civil rights movement taking hold in the South, the Klan had a resurgence, and in 1956, an official revival.
Intimidation, beatings, and lynchings were once again feared by blacks in the South. For a woman who had defied the odds and followed her dreams, Raven Wilkinson now faced a situation for which no rehearsal could prepare her. On that night in Montgomery, surrounded by ongoing Klan rallies, the company wanted to protect Wilkinson. While they danced, she sought safety alone behind a locked door.
So I stayed up in the room, and I didn't go out, and as the dust came and the night came on, The room kind of looked out, it was kind of in the back, and it looked out over kind of a ravine. And over this ravine a bit on the top, I looked and there was a cross burning. I always felt detached after seeing those lifeless sheets, you know, and hoods on the chair. And then seeing that cross burning on the other hill, I thought to myself, this is really interesting, I'm really seeing it for life, for real. It, at least for a while, shattered Raven's career as a dancer.
They never told me to leave the company. I left because of my own disappointment and fatigue. One day, a European ballerina in the company approached her. She said, um... You know, you come, I think you, as far as you can go in the Ballet Russe, we could not have a black person do Swan Lake.
You know, I didn't dispute that, but she said, why don't you get out of the company and form a company of your own and do African dances? I said, you know, I had known nothing, absolutely nothing about African dances. I'm not from Africa.
And I thought, isn't that a twist? After, what irony, after doing Les Sylphides and Swan Lake and all these classical things, to be told, seven years later, and going through all this, get out and form a... But...
Company of African Dance. After seven years of dancing with the Ballet Russe, Wilkinson's ballet career seemed over. She was tired and needed rest. A devout Protestant, she entered a convent in Wisconsin. After a year, she learned her devotion to God need not conflict with her devotion to ballet.
Through going to the convent, I learned that and realized that you don't just have to go in a convent. To live a life where there's grace and a sense of wanting to put yourself to some service and some beauty. She returned to New York and struggled to find a company that would accept her.
One that did was the Capital Ballet. Virginia Johnson saw her perform with this company. Johnson went on to become a famous ballerina and founding member of the Dance Theater of Harlem.
She is currently editor-in-chief of Point Magazine. I actually only saw Raven Wilkinson perform once, but it's a very, very clear image for me. She had come to Washington to perform with the Capitol Ballet, which was an all-black company, and I have to say it was the very first time I saw a black ballerina.
And it's something that I had wanted to be, what I was studying to be all of my life, but I had never actually seen a black woman performing on point. I can still see Raven Wilkinson performing on stage. I'm standing in the wings and she is exquisite.
She's in the costume, her head is moving exactly right, her feet are so beautiful, she's just the embodiment of the music, just the way that you want to be as a dancer. And, you know, that was the moment I thought, yeah, it is possible, it is something that I can do. In 1967 I went to Amsterdam, Holland, the Netherlands, to join the National Ballet, which is called HET.
National Ballet and I lived there and I lived there for seven years as a member and worked in the company. There were many dancers of that time who decided to go to Europe because they just couldn't work in the States. I always felt that they were more interested in who you were rather than what you were.
Wilkinson retired from ballet in 1973 and returned home. One year later, she joined the New York City Opera and is still performing small character roles. It wasn't beneath me to be on stage. It was another opportunity. There's nothing beneath you and there's nothing too small.
Although her name may not be found in history books, it is written in many people's hearts. Wilkinson is an artist among artists. I remember some years that I was in Ballet Russe. I was home on vacation and... Langston Hughes and Dorothy Maynard and my family, I think we went somewhere, and I can't remember where, like to a performance.
And then we all went to the Russian Tea Room afterwards. And they made some remark about the fact that we're three artists. And I remember feeling, wow.
I suddenly felt so special and felt myself in such company and to be included in that, it sort of hit me, wow, you know, I'm an artist too. For all that Wilkinson accomplished, racial prejudices still exist in ballet. Tanya Weidman Davis was a principal ballerina with the Dance Theater of Harlem.
She now heads her own company. When you think of ballet dancers, you think of a white woman and you have the long, you know, hyper-extended legs and the thin, frail feet and all of that. And I have... I have muscular legs, I'm very solid, I have a butt, and a lot of white dancers don't have that.
So obviously, when you put me next to them on stage, I'm going to look completely different. The major. The major problems we're having right now with diversity in ballet are economic rather than social. I think that somebody needs to go out and, you know, hand out a bunch of scholarships to talented young black girls.
When I watch a black person dance, I get goose pimples. Really, I think what ballet today needs to be, it needs to be what America is, and that's a culmination of all races. I know I received an opportunity. I know a lot of people who didn't.
who are of my race and who are not of my race. So if I had a chance to dance at all, and then being black and having a chance to dance, that was really something extraordinary given to me. Because I could have been knocking at the door forever and gone back to all those little auditions and never had a yes.
So I had the opportunity. That fell out of the sky. It was grace come to me.
And that I walked in and tried to fulfill it.