Biography
Pearl Eileen Primus was born in the Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago on November 29, 1919, and relocated to New York with her parents in 1921. Primus began her studies at Hunter College High School as one of the few blacks to do so. Ultimately, Primus attended New York University with a focus on health education courses but transferred to the psychology program at Hunter College in May of 1941.1 Knowing how unfulfilled she would be as a staff of medical personnel, she transitioned to finding jobs within the arts, especially dance. Once in this arena, Primus realized that her natural ability to create precise and colorful movements held higher importance. This opportunity allowed Primus to audition for a scholarship for the New Dance Group which would seal her fate.
As a participant in the New Dance Group, she quickly advanced her movements under formal study while also being involved with activism within the confines of the company’s medium. The New Dance Group was heavily associated with protests and rallies of just causes.2 With the learned experience of the dance group, Primus made her professional debut in New York in 1943. She then began performing at the Café Society Downtown, an integrated nightclub, and in 1944 she gave her first solo recital. That show met with such success that it moved to Broadway. In 1946, Primus appeared in a New York revival of "Showboat," as well as in Louis Gruenberg's opera "The Emperor Jones" at the Chicago Civic Opera."3
After establishing herself through performances with the dance company, she and the Primus troupe toured colleges and universities. As fate would have it, on April 28, 1948, Primus performed her dance routine at Fisk University in front of president Charles Johnson, Johnson's wife, and Marjorie Rawlings (author of The Yearling), who thereafter pressed Embree to award her the last fellowship.4
Primus received notification of her successful fellowship application in May 1948. She was awarded a fellowship of $2,500 fellowship and $1,500 in travel expenses to study African dances in Liberia for 9 months.5 She began preparations for her trip over the summer of 1948 and departed for her study in Africa later that same year. Primus was abroad for 8 months and traveled to Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Cameroon, Liberia, and Senegal, studying over 30 cultural groups.6 Before leaving the United States, Primus was invited by the Rosenwald Committee to attend the Fund’s final dinner in Chicago on May 28, 1948. The Fund was closing that year, as Julius Rosenwald had intended it to, and Primus was to be a representative of its success in fueling the careers of artists and scholars.
Previously Primus was denied an earlier fellowship in 1947. Her rejection from this fellowship fueled her intensity to try again the last year that the fellowship was distributed in 1948. She attained recommendations from well-renowned critics and mentors who had viewed her dance interpretations. While Primus’s initial plan was to interpret James Weldon Johnson’s “God’s Trombone” and the poem “Go Down Death” as a study of universality, the carbon copy of this plan in Fisk University’s Special Collections pencils in a revised plan: “for study of African dancing in Africa.”7 This new plan created more legroom for Primus to travel and research abroad, thereby strengthening her anthropological education and, ultimately, her ability to teach. Between her performance at Fisk on April 28, 1948 and her departure in December 1948 to Africa, she described her feelings about receiving the fellowship in a letter written to a correspondent:
“My soul hopped out of my body, swung on the lights, kissed everyone present, flew out of the window and screamed with the wind and vanished into the night like a thing insane––Mrs. Johnson planted the seed––this girl––Africa! The others watered it and now a little tree was growing.”8
The Rosenwald grant allowed Primus to study the style of dancing, the rhythms, the masks, and the life of the people throughout Africa. She was able to discover the “motivating forces behind such dances as well as the amazing technical, stylistic, and thematic scope of African dance.”9 Primus eventually sketched a plan for a school with a curriculum based on ideas that were strongly influenced by her African experience; at the time of her death, she continued to carry the desire to inspire others through dance: “Dance has been my language, my strength...I have confided my most secret thoughts and the inner music of all mankind...I dance not to entertain but to help people better understand each other.”10
*Written by Destiny Reed
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1. Murray Schwartz and Peggy Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 16-17.↩
2. Such as the shooting and ultimate death of a young labor organizer Harry Simms by a New Jersey police officer in 1939 (Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me, 29).↩
3. "Pearl Primus," Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, (New York: Macmillan, 1996), reprinted by permission of Gale Group, https://www.thirteen.org/freetodance/biographies/primus.html, accessed 6 February 2020.↩
4. Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me, 69.↩
5.“Plan of work,” 1948, Rosenwald Collection, Box 441, Folder 15, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University.↩
6. Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me, 71-72.↩
7. “Plan of work,” 1948, Rosenwald Collection, Box 441, Folder 15, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University.↩
8. Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me, 70.↩
9. Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me, 78-80.↩
10. Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me, 80.↩