The dancer who broke ballet’s color barrier

In 1968, Arthur Mitchell was about to catch a flight to Brazil, where he was working to establish a national ballet company, when he heard a devastating news bulletin on the radio: Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Mitchell, who had achieved international stardom as the first black dancer to perform principal roles in a major ballet company, was overcome with emotion. Instead of getting on the plane, Mitchell turned around and went home to Harlem, determined to work for change in the U.S. He began teaching dance in a remodeled garage, and within four months his Dance Theatre of Harlem had 800 students and was on its way to becoming one of the most sought-after companies in the world. “There was still a fallacy that black people could not do classical ballet,” Mitchell said. “People said to me, ‘Arthur, you’re the exception.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I had the opportunity.’” Born and raised in Harlem, the young Mitchell “helped support his family by shining shoes and delivering newspapers,” said The Guardian (U.K.). A guidance counselor encouraged Mitchell to audition for New York City’s prestigious High School of Performing Arts after seeing him dance the jitterbug at a junior high party. There he earned a scholarship to the School of American Ballet in New York, “the training ground for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet.” Mitchell made his debut with the company in 1955, said The Washington Post, and two years later was cast in the groundbreaking modernist ballet Agon. Mitchell’s spare yet intimate pas de deux with Diana Adams, a white woman, was “pioneering, if not shocking, for 1950s audiences.” Five years later, “Balanchine created the role of a lifetime for Mitchell as the high-flying, harddancing, naughty Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said The New York Times—a role he’d be forever identified with. At the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the nation’s first predominantly black classical ballet company, Mitchell tailored productions for his troupe. Costumes were “designed to flatter a variety of skin tones,” and his restaging of Giselle moved the ballet to 19th-century Louisiana, with Creole characters. When asked earlier this year about his greatest accomplishment, Mitchell replied, “That I actually bucked society. And an art form that was three, four hundred years old, and brought black people into it.”