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10 Katherine Dunham’s Southland: Protest in the Face of Repression Constance Valis Hill The man who truly loves his country is the man who is able to see it in the bad as well as the good and seeing the bad declaim it, at the cost of liberty or life. Katherine Dunham, prologue to Southland In 1951, at the dawning of a decade that would be known for its suffocating conformity and political intolerance, Katherine Dunham created Southland, a dramatic ballet Americana about what was by then the century-long practice of lynching. In the program notes to the ballet, which premiered at the Opera House in Santiago de Chile, Dunham wrote, ‘‘This is the story of no actual lynching in the southern states of America, and still it is the story of every one of them.’’1 She spoke the prologue on stage, in Spanish : Though I have not smelled the smell of burning flesh, and have never seen a black body swaying from a southern tree, I have felt these things in spirit. . . . Through the creative artist comes the need to show this thing to the world, hoping that by exposing the ill, the conscience of the many will protest.’’2 Southland, a protest as much against lynching as against the destructive powers of hatred, was created before the Selma march of 1965, the Freedom rides, the student sit-ins; before the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955; and before the lynching of Emmett Till. Unlike the 1960s, artistic expression in the late 1940s and 1950s provoked suspicion and outright repression. It was a time 289 290 /  3:  when dissent itself seemed illegitimate, subversive, un-American. The story of Southland tells of the consequences of social protest in the 1950s, the decade once described as ‘‘the happiest, most stable, most rational period the Western world has known since 1914.’’3 But it also reveals the temperament and perhaps the very soul of protest expression rooted in the African American political struggle, an expression that was for Dunham both a public act and private rite de passage, affirming how dancing is a healing process as well as a political act. THE 1940 In the postwar years, Dunham was at the height of a stage and film career that had been launched on Broadway with Cabin in the Sky in 1940. Fame seemed limitless for the woman most remembered as ‘‘decked out in singular hats and dresses, daring to wear feathers, bright colors, soft fabrics,’’4 though the woman who was making brilliant-textured transformations of indigenous Caribbean dances was still limited by racial discrimination. There was the ongoing critical debate as to whether she was a serious artist or a popularizer, whether comment and integrity in her work were ‘‘sacrificed to conform to what Broadway expected the Negro dance to be.’’5 There was Dunham’s perennial double-image, in which she was simultaneously viewed as ‘‘the hottest thing’’ on Broadway and ‘‘an intelligent anthropologist of note.’’6 Perpetual intimations of a split personality appeared in such headlines as ‘‘Schoolmarm Turned Siren,’’ ‘‘Torridity to Anthropology,’’ ‘‘Cool Scientist or Sultry Performer?’’ and ‘‘High Priestess of Jive.’’7 However, the clever phrases invented to cheapen her talent and tarnish her beauty diminished neither her popularity nor her creative output. The Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theatre opened in New York in 1944, and throughout the 1940s— from club work at Ciro’s in Hollywood and the Martinique Club in New York to musicals in Chicago and performances in Mexico City, London, Paris, and Rome—Dunham and her company of singers, dancers, and musicians were on what seemed a perpetual tour across America and around the world. Touring did not keep Dunham out of touch but instead only :  ’  / 291 heightened her awareness of America where, simultaneous with the optimism of postwar prosperity, there was the ever-presence of Jim Crow in transportation, education, and public accommodation . Though lynching was rampant and went without condemnation in the South during the 1930s, it declined in the 1940s. However, violence continued against blacks, countless and perpetual acts of violence that were part of an overall pattern of retaliation against postwar egalitarianism.8 From 1936 to 1946, forty-three lynchings of mostly Southern blacks were reported, though the lynchings went unprosecuted. The most notorious lynchings were the 1944 drowning of a fifteen-year-old black youth in the Suwannee River, an act that the boy’s father was forced to witness, and...

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