One of the greatest privileges of my career in folklore was the opportunity to explore the legacy of Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates, a Black one-legged tap dancer, who owned an interracial Catskills resort for 38 years. In the fall of 2016, shortly after I became the Folk Arts Program Manager with Arts Mid-Hudson, Geoff Miller, the Ulster County historian, introduced me to Bates’ legacy. Miller had long wanted to do in-depth research on Bates and hoped that I could raise some funds and join him. We were awarded a grant from New York Humanities and began the project in 2021.
African Americans
Vicie A. Rolling
Vicie A. Rolling of "Framing the Past", is a storyteller and oral historian who concentrates on telling the stories of African American life in the twentieth century. She says, "With historical research, I craft dialogue and narratives of their lives. I sometimes...
Akilah Briggs-Melvin
Step dance, also known as stepping, is a style of percussive dance where a dancer uses their entire body as an instrument to make rhythms and sounds through a mixture of footsteps, spoken words,and hand claps. Traditionally stepping was rooted and developed after the...
Good Reads:
Reviews of The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, by Ben Raines and Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” by Zora Neale Hurston; and All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles
The Celebration of Pinkster in New York State
Written by guest author, Chief Baba Neil Clarke The Pinkster Festival is a very important 350-year-old, but little known, Africanized celebration which took place annually in the Hudson River Valley region, including the N.Y.C. area for almost two hundred years. ...
Good Read
A book review of “Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking” by Toni Tipton-Martin.
Follow Spot: Growing the Ranks
An essay about the founding of Women of Color in the Arts, by Kaisha Johnson.