Bill Bojangles Robinson: Tap and the Staircase

He was born Luther Robinson on May twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy-eight, on the north side of Richmond. He would become the highest-paid and best-known Black entertainer in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, and he would do it by reimagining what tap dance was. He left Richmond young and built his career through minstrel shows, then vaudeville, then Broadway, then Hollywood.

He took the name Bojangles, a word he used casually to mean a quarrelsome or careless person, the kind of nickname that stuck. By the time he reached his peak he was known simply as Bojangles worldwide. Marshall Stearns, a leading critic of jazz and dance, described Robinson's specific contribution to tap this way: he brought the dance up onto its toes.

Before Robinson, tap was largely a flat-footed shuffle. Robinson elevated it, danced it upright, gave it what Stearns called a hitherto-unknown lightness and presence. His signature routine was the stair dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in sequences of rhythmic complexity that he tried and failed to patent because no patent office had a mechanism for registering a dance.

He was one of the first Black performers in American entertainment to appear without blackface makeup. He worked to break the vaudeville two-color rule that had forced Black performers to share billing with white performers. He danced with Shirley Temple in a series of films in the nineteen thirties, in an era when that pairing required careful navigation of American racial norms.

Richmond placed a statue of Robinson in Jackson Ward, near where he grew up. He died in New York City in nineteen forty-nine at age seventy-one, and the city of New York mourned him with a public processional.