Hello you're listening to the Witness Podcast with me Lucy Burns from the BBC World Service.

And today we're going back to New York in August 1969 and the formation of the Dance Theatre

of Harlem, which would become the first classical ballet company to concentrate on black dancers. One of the founder members of the Dance Theatre of Harlem was Virginia Johnson, now the

organization's artistic director. She'd been studying ballet since she was three at the Washington

School of Ballet, but when she graduated her teacher took her to one side.

She called me in her office and she said, you know I know that you're going to have a

career but you're never going to be a ballet dancer because there just aren't any black ballet dancers.

I was incredibly grateful that she had waited till that moment to tell me that, but it was pretty crushing.

So Virginia went to study Modern Dance in New York instead.

But I missed ballet tremendously, and somebody said to me you know Arthur Mitchell is teaching

ballet class up in Harlem on Saturdays why don't you just go up there and get your

ballet fix and come back down here and do the real dancing?

Arthur Mitchell had been the first African American dancer to have a permanent contract with an American ballet company,

and he'd set up a ballet school in the basement of a church in Harlem.

I went up to 140 First Street, St James Church, and there were, you know, some three, four hundred

kids running around very crazy, and then when the ballet class started, they were very

focused and they were very committed and I thought

wow this is just amazing this is so what a wonderful environment.

He'd had the idea for the Dance Theatre of Harlem the previous year while he'd been working to set up a

national ballet company in Brazil.

So he was on his way of the airport on April 4th, 1968, which is of course the day that

Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and that stopped

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