This is a paper I wrote whilst studying US history at university, to do with racial issues surrounding Lindy Hop. It covers some of the history of Lindy, though there are some generalisations (it was written for the academic eyes of a lecturer who had no interest in dance). It’s a little dry and academic, but Lindy Hoppers might enjoy some of the quotes to do with how Lindy Hop was received by the general (read white) public in the 20s and 30s. I’ll see if I can dig up some of the old sources I refer to, and post them on my blog. And of course, this was written many years before Frankie Manning’s autobiography was released, but I would certainly have referred to that in this essay, had it been available at the time.

Lindy Hop was born amidst the heady cultural atmosphere of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when African-Americans were migrating en masse from the rural south to the northern urban centres, including New York City. These new urban ghettoes cultivated a distinctly African-American culture, despite continuing racial discrimination, unemployment, low wages, scarce housing, high rent and overcrowding. The migration from South to North became a paradigm shift for African-American identity – from rural peasant Negro to urban “New Negro” and Harlem became the Mecca of urban African-American life.

With roots in African dance, secular social dancing had played an integral part in African-American life since slavery, and the growing Black community in Harlem continued this tradition. With the birth of jazz came also Black jazz dances, and these African-American cultural forms evolved alongside each other in the dancehalls, nightclubs, cabarets and rent parties[1] that sprung up in Harlem. On 12 March 1926 the grandiose Savoy Ballroom opened its doors in Harlem, occupying an entire city block from 140th to 141st Streets. Unlike other ballrooms in Harlem, the Savoy was not segregated, and catered specifically to Harlem’s African-American community. There the Lindy Hop was born and thrived alongside the greatest African-American swing bands, until well after World War II. Lindy Hopper Norma Miller remembers:

“Everybody came to the Savoy Ballroom. It was the home of Black dancing. It was the home of Swing, and everybody wanted to learn Swing. You had to come to the Savoy Ballroom. It was the dance that was created in Harlem.”[2]

Yet Lindy Hopping at the Savoy was not merely a form of entertainment or leisure. The Lindy Hop and other African-American jazz dances were complex practices of cultural expression, social interaction, community formation and collective representation. As the only capital possessed by slaves, the body had become central to the expression of African-American identity. The Lindy Hop was imbued with African-American dance traditions of rhythm, syncopation, improvisation and joyful exuberance. As well as a medium for self and collective representation, social dance had reclaimed the Black body from its appropriation by White society, initially through slavery and later by exploitation and discrimination in urban waged labour. In this context, dance is the most personal articulation of political forces and personal power.[3] Through the Lindy Hop, dancers at the Savoy could assert a sense of agency:

“The black body is celebrated as an instrument of pleasure, rather than an instrument of labour. The night time becomes the right time, and the space allocated for recovery and recuperation is assertively and provocatively occupied by the pursuit of leisure and pleasure.”[4]

As White Americans flocked to Harlem to witness the wild new dance,[5] public opposition to Lindy Hop found its voice. This racially charged opposition came from many camps: religious leaders, prohibitionists, medical professionals and traditional dance institutions. Traditionalist concepts of race bore strongly upon the opposition to Lindy Hop,[6] covering the spectrum of arguments that had characterised racism throughout American history. Religious parties denounced the dance as pagan and profane.[7] Scientific racism came from many camps, who traced the liveliness of Lindy Hop to the African jungle and its primitive, barbaric tribes. A 1921 article in the Ladies Home Journal entitled “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” insisted that jazz would “invoke savage instincts”[8] and was originally “the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds.” [9] In 1919 the National Dancing Masters’ Association banned jazz music, on the basis that it “invites immoral variations” [10] in their dancehalls.

The White opposition to Lindy Hop had two distinct effects. Firstly it unified the African-American communities in their pride of this cultural form as distinctly African-American. Conversely, however, it encouraged White American youth to appropriate the dance, not out of amity with African-Americans, but as a means of explicit resistance to societal norms and the traditional values of their parents’ generation. Both groups sought to construct and separate themselves from the White American establishment, but along different lines. For White American teenagers, the dance became known as the Jitterbug. The same community-building power Lindy Hop held for African-Americans, the Jitterbug held for the creation of a White American youth culture that would soon span the nation.

Of course White American youth’s interest in Lindy Hop disturbed the critics even more than the original dance had. With the Jitterbug phenomenon in full swing, so to speak, opposition to the dance was at its height in the late 1930s, and still echoed with racist sentiments referencing the African-American origins of the dance. With White Americans now dancing the Lindy Hop, the cultural influence of an “inferior race” became a threat to White civilisation itself, which risked retrogression to barbarism.[11] In 1939 Dr John Lalli of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathy publicly admonished swing dancing as a “throwback to the war and religious dances of primitive tribes”[12] and in 1938 Catholic Archbishop Francis J. Beckman announced:

“We permit, if not freely endorse, by our criminal indifference, jam sessions, jitterbugs and cannibalistic rhythmic orgies to occupy a place in our social scheme of things, wooing our youth along the primrose path to hell!”[13]

The renewed opposition, however, only served to further unify American youth in their passion for the dance, and the thriving musical theatre and Hollywood film industries were quick to capitalise on the craze, featuring African-American Lindy Hoppers in films and Broadway shows. Yet these representations of African-American culture actually served to perpetuate rather than challenge White racial domination. The finest of the Savoy Ballroom’s Lindy Hoppers were handpicked to form a troupe called Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. The troupe appeared in a number of Hollywood films, yet they were depicted as dancing Negro peasants,[14] restaurant entertainers[15] or household staff. The 1941 film Hellzapoppin[16] features the most spectacular Lindy Hop sequence ever preserved on film. In this film Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers and a number of celebrated swing musicians appear dressed as domestic servants (maids, chefs, gardeners, chauffeurs and so on). Neglecting their duties, the musicians strike up a swing tune on the unattended instruments of a visiting band. The Lindy Hoppers dance wildly until discovered by their White superiors, whereupon they scatter to return to their posts. The scene not only institutes a social hierarchy of subservient African-Americans, but also perpetuates a racial stereotype of the wayward, negligent Negro. This scene explicitly demonstrates the White consumption of an African-American cultural form in a manner that perpetuated White racial domination and societal norms.

Despite the fact that Lindy Hop, and for that matter, jazz music in general brought White and Black Americans together into a common experience, racial discrimination against Black dancers, professional entertainers, musicians, dance hall proprietors and the general African-American community remained omnipresent. While the Savoy was an integrated ballroom, open to White dancers as well as the African-American community, Black dancers did not receive the same benefit at other Harlem ballrooms or nightclubs. African-American patrons were even barred from the Cotton Club, internationally renowned for African-American entertainment, yet open to a strictly White clientele. Only the most wealthy and famous of African-Americans could procure a table at the club, and even then they were seated in a shadowed, rear corner. Black performers, including Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, were often turned away from segregated hotels and restaurants while touring the rest of the country.[17] Meanwhile, the majority of Harlem’s African-American community faced underemployment, exploitation through low wages and poorly maintained housing, coupled with high rents and discrimination in their daily lives. Yet, as African-American intellectual Ralph Ellison has suggested:

“For all the harsh reality of the social and economic injustices visited upon them, these injustices have failed to keep Negroes clear of the cultural mainstream; Negro Americans are, in fact, one of its major tributaries.”[18]

Thus the eventual absorption of Lindy Hop into official institutions occurred despite the continued marginalisation of African-Americans. Indeed, in appropriating the Lindy Hop, White American youth had divested it of its racial signification in order to generate new meanings of generational difference.[19] By 1942 market forces compelled the New York Society of Teachers of Dancing to officially introduce the Jitterbug into its teaching repertoire, acknowledging that “youth was dancing the Jitterbug and would continue to dance it and the fact must be recognised.” [20] Yet this apparent assimilation of an African-American cultural form into White American culture was achieved only by denying its origins. The New York Society of Teachers of Dancing insisted that “the jitterbug in its essence was an expression of youth,”[21] ignoring its distinctly African-American roots.

This process culminated in LIFE magazine’s 1943 declaration that Lindy Hop was “The American National Dance.”[22] The cover of this issue of LIFE magazine featured two young White dancers and was entitled “The Lindy Hop.” Within, a photographic essay featured ten pages of large photographs of these White teenagers. Towards the rear of the magazine, a few small photographs pictured two African-American dancers who had been members of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. A subtitle to the article reads “The Lindy Hop, a True National Folk Dance has been born in the USA.” This article marked the assimilation of the Lindy Hop into American identity whilst simultaneously erasing the dance’s African-American character. The process seems to have been completed when, in a court ruling on 2 May 1944, in which a young woman was suing for injuries sustained when she was sent into a spin by a “jive-maddened marine”, Judge Henry M. Willis’ decision read:

“The dance he (the marine) forced the plaintiff to participate in is called ‘jitterbug’. The origin of this word appears to be obscure and as remote as the origin and reason of the dance.”[23]

Thus the African-American roots of the Jitterbug, drawn directly from the Lindy Hop, had been completely obliterated. The Lindy Hop had been wholly absorbed into American national culture and identity, despite the continuing marginalisation of African-American people. This process has been played out repeatedly throughout the twentieth century. Indeed Ralph Ellison posited that African-Americans played such a complex and confounding role in the creation of American history and culture that “few Americans know who or what they really are.” [24] The contradictory manner in which race is played out in American society continues to this day, with African-American culture appropriated as a subversive mode, reproduced and disseminated within a consumer culture, and eventually absorbed into mainstream American society and identity, divested of its racial signification. Cultural appreciation does not directly generate social equality and the White American consumption of Lindy Hop remained within the constraints of the dominant racial order. As Ellison conjectured:

“The melting pot did indeed melt, creating such deceptive metamorphoses and blending of identities, values and lifestyles that most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it.” [25]

By Sharon Davis.

Footnotes:

[1] Harlem residents frequently held “rent parties” in their apartments, with music and dancing in return for an entry fee that was used to pay the monthly rent.

[2] Norma Miller, Swingin’ At The Savoy: The Memoir of a Jazz Dancer, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1996, p. 28.

[3] Cynthia J. Novack, “The Body’s Endeavours as Cultural Practices” in Susan Leigh Foster (ed.), Choreographing History, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995, p.182

[4] Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London, Serpent’s Tail, 1994, p.102.

[5] Levi C. Hubert, “The Whites Invade Harlem,” Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project (1936-40), 12

December 1938, , 1938 (accessed 1 September 2005).

[6] Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans: Acceptance of a New Art Form, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 38.

[7] “Warns of Effect of ‘Swing’ on Youth,” New York Times, 26 October 1938, p. 20.

[8] Anne Shaw Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?”, Ladies Home Journal, August 1921, p. 16.

[9] Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?”, p. 28.

[10] Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?”, p. 20.

[11] Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, p. 51.

[12] “Advises Jitterbugs to Train,” New York Times, 25 January 1939, p. 18

[13] “Warns of Effect of ‘Swing’ on Youth,” p. 20.

[14] See, for instance A Day At The Races, dir. Sam Wood, MGM, 1937

[15] See, for instance Keep Punching, dir. John Clein, MC Pictures, 1939.

[16] Hellzapoppin’, dir. H.C. Potter, Universal, 1941.

[17] Miller, Swingin’ At The Savoy: The Memoir of a Jazz Dancer, p. 56.

[18] Ralph Ellison, “What Would America Be Like Without Blacks?”, 6 April 1970, , 1970 (accessed 2 September 2005).

[19] Novack, “The Body’s Endeavours as Cultural Practices,” p. 181.

[20] “Jitterbug Accepted As Ballroom Dance: New York Teachers Combine it with Lindy for Classes,” New York Times, 20 September 1943, p. 23.

[21] “Jitterbug Accepted As Ballroom Dance,” p. 23.

[22] “The Lindy Hop: The American National Dance,” LIFE, 23 August 1943, pp. 95-103.

[23] “Court Rules Jitterbug is All Word Implies: ‘Jitter’ for Nervous and ‘Bug’ for Crazy,” The New York Times, 3 May 1944, p. 21.

[24] Ellison, “What Would America Be Like Without Blacks?”

[25] Ellison, “What Would America Be Like Without Blacks?”