As an African American, I began my study of dance at an early age, training for years in multiple genres. I pursued performance experiences through private studios, ballet academies, competition dance companies, and regional dance ensembles. I amassed knowledge of dance history, composition, research, and injury prevention, as well as production and promotion of dance events, all through undergraduate and graduate study at the Master’s degree level in predominantly white colleges and universities (PWIs). From 1987 as an undergraduate student, through the time I completed graduate study in 1995, to my departure from the faculty at Coker College, a small private institution in Hartsville, South Carolina, in 2009, I taught dance in private studios, in K-12 schools, and eventually in colleges and universities. I always taught in PWIs and was led by my personal experience. By this, I refer to my training in the Western concert dance forms of ballet, modern, and jazz as taught to me by nearly all Caucasian instructors who employed widely accepted, traditional Western models of dance curriculum design and best practices as found in the valued dance education literature taught in PWIs. I was comfortable in the milieu of PWIs and confident in my ability to perform, choreograph, and teach its generally accepted genres.

In 2009, I accepted a position to create a new dance program at JCSU , an HBCU originally founded to educate freed slaves following the Civil War, and one that had never offered the canonical forms of dance I had experienced in the past. I served for eight years as Associate Professor of Dance, as well as Chair of the Department of Visual, Performing, & Communication Arts for four of those years, with responsibility for creating a new dance program within JCSU. As a mid-career professional woman, with a lifetime of experience in teaching and the administration of dance, I was faced with what felt like a genuinely clean slate for the first time in my professional life. However, after several years of working in this new environment, I became aware that there are values about the dancing body embedded within this HBCU environment that differ from my personal experiences with dance in PWIs. Therefore, my goal is to pursue a research trajectory in which these differing movement elements and traditions discovered in HBCUs might come better into focus as I connect them to the American dance education story developing in the twentieth century and continuing to develop into the twenty-first century.

Tangential, but deeply connected to my research, is my responsibility to design and implement a university dance program while also meeting the needs and desires of students and faculty choosing to study and teach in HBCUs. Having taught and trained in various PWI schools, I needed to find out what these students want and expect from an HBCU dance program. Is it different from what my previous PWI students were seeking? This information did not exist in any collected form, but I felt that if I could determine this, it would help me to design an appropriate dance curriculum for my HBCU. Therefore, my research explores how these needs and desires for an education from a uniquely African American perspective were expressed historically and how they are evidenced in the values and mission statements of the current dance programs I chose for my research stream.

My study will allow me to be cognizant of the potential future needs of students choosing to study in HBCUs, as they prepare to navigate through a dance world that is quickly changing day-to-day and one that is multifaceted with boundaries that are unexpectedly shifting as the world changes. To this end, this research study is my exploration into how selected HBCUs in the Southern region of the United States, with clearly delineated but very different dance programs, choose to identify their values and interests over time within their historical and current published missions and curricular designs. It explores how some HBCUs create a dance culture and a dance program, and raises the question of where the literature on dance in HBCUs may be found. This research will hopefully open new insights into how dance developed within the United States in diverse university and college environments, by adding the voices of those working and studying in HBCU settings.

In my approach, I cover the following territory. I begin with an overview of the history of HBCUs and their development over time, specifically in connection to the five HBCUs having strong dance programs in the Southeast United States selected for this study. For each of these schools, I share my in-depth look at archival, library, and social media data within the dance programs, as well as how the university and dance program mission statements and curricular designs are publicly presented currently and over time. It is important in each case to remember the limitations of the study. Only extant or existing data was used, and what can be found online during the particular time frame of data collection may not always be accurate. In the following chapter, I will describe in detail the dance programs selected and their importance to my research. Further, I will discuss how I chose the selected programs, why I chose to work from data that is publicly accessible on the Internet and located within each school’s historical archives, and how I developed the organization of the data chapters.

Clearly, the demographics of an HBCU differ from those of PWIs of higher learning, specifically in terms of racial makeup and often in terms of economic status of the student populations. Furthermore, HBCUs differ from other minority-serving institutions (Hispanic-serving institutions, Men’s and women’s institutions, and other special interest subgroups of the ever-changing American population) in that HBCUs were established historically based on an African American culture transitioning from a slave to a free economy. In my decades of training and experience, the clear majority of the literature on dance in American higher education focused specifically on the historical and current practices of training dancers and dance scholars in PWIs. Ideally, these new observations will hopefully add to future twenty-first-century possibilities for how dance education is practiced and imagined, as the American student population continues to rapidly become diverse in terms of race, culture, and scholarship.

The obstacles my HBCU students face are different from both those I faced, and the obstacles of those dancers of color with whom I studied as an undergraduate or graduate student in PWIs. The socioeconomic levels are often different, the level of family support is often different, even the expectation and interpretation of success is many times different than what I experienced. Today, I often train students who can scarcely afford formal instruction and whose prior experiences of dance training include classes with dance instructors who never used dance terminology generally found in academic or dance studio settings. Many of my students have neither parental fiscal support for their education nor funding for dance clothing and supplies, something most of my former classmates and I took for granted at the PWIs we attended. Certainly, Caucasian dancers in PWIs or elsewhere also come from varied socioeconomic backgrounds, however the disparate income levels of many of my HBCU students gave me pause for thought. These types of financial challenges, linked with the challenges these students often face when navigating through a society that has differing value systems, creates a unique terrain. On this new terrain, there is room for new insights into how a liberal arts education can prepare students with diverse needs and backgrounds to become active, empowered, useful, and well-rounded human beings in a society. Therefore, guiding questions along my research path became: How do the professional needs of these HBCU dancers connect to their desire to be enriched by their cultural heritage within an HBCU? How then does this cultural heritage provide them with the ability to become active shapers of their futures and the society holding their futures? And how can a developing dance curriculum also prepare students to develop numerous and diverse choices for their lives upon graduation?

While conducting research about the history of HBCUs, I found a recurring theme running throughout the histories of these schools. The very argument between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington that raged as our nation debated separate but equal schools for white and black children is the exact same argument that persists today, as the nation debates the continued relevance of these HBCU institutions. As Du Bois believed then, the black race is best lifted in society by studying the Western classics, thereby achieving high academic levels through scholarly pursuits equal to those of any white man. Washington, on the other hand, believed that economic independence through mastery of trades was far more important and practical. It is my firm belief that these two concepts concerning the education of black people are both in effect on each of the current HBCU campuses in this study, and that these seemingly opposing viewpoints provide excellent lenses through which to open discussion on the varied ways in which dance can be found on historically black campuses. While what I share here about Du Bois and Washington and their respective philosophies may provide insights about how both philosophies persist today, this research does not attempt to choose or recommend one over the other. The data is given only for the reader to better understand the context of HBCUs.

In the following chapters, I will introduce the avenues I pursued to illuminate the distinctly different ways dance has evolved within 5 selected HBCU dance programs in the Southeastern region of the United States. In Chapter 2, I present the research methods and procedures designed and implemented in my research study and clarify my approach to data collection, coding, and writing. In Chapter 3, an overall history of HBCUs is presented with a more detailed history of the five schools selected for this study and their respective dance programs. Within this chapter, I also provide brief explanations of terms and selected biographies of the significant historical and influential figures introduced in the study. Interestingly, these explanations became extremely necessary when I realized that many highly influential HBCU dance artists and teachers were being introduced through the data collection process who do not appear in any depth within the current published literature I had read on dance in American higher education. Many of the biographies had to be constructed from information found indirectly through varied websites and Google searches. However, in terms of their influence on the development of dance within the differing HBCU institutions in which each worked, these individuals were vital.

Two data chapters follow the historical research. These data chapters include information collected by multiple means. The first includes researching websites for each higher education institution in the study and reviewing print materials and photographs in institutional archives. Archival materials included yearbooks, school newspapers, local newspapers, and programs and posters from past campus productions. In searching these sources, I sought insights into how each campus viewed dance-related events, experiences, and people. The second method of data collection includes a review of the different library holdings discovered within each institution’s dance collection. The last method focuses on how images uploaded to differing forms of social media provide a visual representation of what is valued by students, faculty, and school administration.

Upon a review of all collected data, I chose to organize the data chapters in a manner that helps to underscore what someone new to the HBCU environment might find familiar about dance on HBCU campuses, and what the same person might find unfamiliar and enlightening about this black dancing environment. In the fourth chapter I discuss those aspects of dance on an HBCU campus that I found familiar from my previous dance experiences in higher education. This chapter also discusses ways in which HBCUs establish and maintain connections to the African diaspora through their dance-related activities, both inside and outside the curriculum, through place, call and response, and ring shout. These are among the aspects of HBCU dance programs that I reference as foreign, meaning that someone like myself who has trained and taught only in PWI schools might find the practices foreign to our previous experience, though quite common in the HBCU milieu. In the fifth chapter, the research introduces the history and dance offerings of the five subject schools, to reveal how very much information is held in each school and hint at what the greater dance community may be missing by the absence of HBCUs from broader conversations on dance in higher education.

In the sixth and concluding chapter of this research. I discuss why this research is important to me as a scholarly researcher and as a dance educator continually engaged in curriculum design and implementation. I reflect upon how this research may affect my current and future students. I consider the ramifications of the familiar and unfamiliar discoveries revealed by this research on the field of dance in higher education. Finally, I revisit how and why the history of dance in HBCUs is relevant in the broader, contempor...