Someday in 1887 (or in 1888, or perhaps in one other 12 months altogether), two boys from Richmond — one White, one Black — hopped a freight practice collectively and headed north to Washington searching for fame. The White boy would develop into a well-known stage performer. The Black boy grew as much as develop into much more famend — onstage, on display screen, as a breaker of boundaries and as a philanthropist.
Washington, D.C
Perspective | For a brief time before his fame, ‘Bojangles’ Robinson danced in D.C.
His title was Invoice “Bojangles” Robinson. The pioneering faucet dancer by no means forgot his time in Washington, as inauspicious as it could have appeared on the time.
Robinson was born in Richmond in 1878. As recounted on this area final week, his mellifluous nickname was a bastardization of the surname of Richmond hat maker L.J. Boujasson.
As a boy, Robinson shined footwear and shucked peas close to Richmond’s most important market. When enterprise was sluggish, he and his buddies danced for pennies. Typically they danced outdoors theaters the place minstrel exhibits have been carried out. One in every of his buddies, an older boy named Lemeul Toney, satisfied Robinson to go to Washington.
On their arrival, “the 2 boys picked up odd jobs wherever they might, normally dancing in beer gardens round city,” wrote Jim Haskins and N.R. Mitgang of their 1988 biography of Robinson.
Robinson picked up a further job: rubbing down the “hots” at Bennings Racetrack. This meant rubbing down a sweating horse after it had raced or had a exercise.
Bennings Racetrack was one in all 10 horse tracks that operated in Washington over time. The earliest ones — in Georgetown and Alexandria — dated to the 1760s, predating the institution of the capital.
“Washington’s racetracks ran the gamut from small native tracks with an environment akin to that of a rustic truthful, to locations with imposing infrastructure run by better-respected jockey golf equipment,” wrote Lara Otis within the journal Washington Historical past. They provided a wide range of occasions, together with flat racing, steeplechase and harness racing.
The one-mile Bennings — or Benning — Racetrack observe was in-built 1875 by F.P. Hill. It was in Northeast D.C., slightly below the Anacostia the place the tributary crosses the Maryland border.
Although its imposing grandstand wasn’t constructed till 1896 — after Robinson’s sojourn within the District — Bennings was one of many nicer tracks on the town. When betting was outlawed in Washington in 1908, it turned a winter coaching floor. Ultimately even that closed. The location turned Mayfair Mansions, the housing improvement accomplished in 1946 and designed by Howard College structure professor Albert Cassell.
Sources fluctuate as to how previous Invoice Robinson was when he made the journey to Washington with Toney and took a job on the observe. In some accounts, he was as younger as 8. In others he was 10 or 12. Toney — who gained vaudeville fame below the title Eddie Leonard — recommended that Robinson was shut to twenty, however he was recognized to fudge dates and ages.
A later date is sensible if one other anecdote related with Robinson’s time in Washington is to be believed. In later years each Robinson and entertainer Al Jolson insisted their paths had crossed within the District.
Recognized then as Asa Yoelson, Jolson arrived in Washington in 1894 along with his household. His father had taken a job as a cantor in a synagogue in Southwest. The younger Jolson would hang around close to Heart Market, the place the Nationwide Archives stands at present. There, in response to lore, he met a dancer from Richmond nicknamed Bojangles.
A 1941 newspaper profile of Robinson famous: “Invoice, by his personal confession, nonetheless owes Al for a borrowed bicycle he smashed up in a collision with a supply wagon, when each have been lugging baskets from Heart Market … for no matter meager charges the thrifty housewives of the interval noticed match to bestow upon them.”
However Jolson was born almost a decade after Robinson. Might the 2 actually have met when each have been boys?
In any occasion, Washington was a mere relaxation cease on Robinson’s profession journey. After a time period right here, Robinson adopted Toney to New York Metropolis and landed a task within the refrain of “The South Earlier than the Struggle,” a closely nostalgic view of plantation life. This was the primary skilled manufacturing Robinson was a part of. Later got here success on his personal phrases: on Broadway, on tour and in such movies as “The Little Colonel,” wherein he taught Shirley Temple to faucet dance up a flight of stairs.
As a author for the Chicago Every day Information put it in 1935: “Most tap-dancers break the arches of their toes in an try to get applause, however not Invoice Robinson. His steps are as delicate as a cat’s, as exact as a comptometer, but by no means mechanical or vulgarly good.” (The comptometer was the primary key-driven mechanical calculator.)
Robinson by no means forgot his transient time in Washington or his Richmond roots. In 1933, after watching two African American youngsters narrowly escape damage whereas crossing busy Chamberlayne Parkway, Robinson paid for the set up of a site visitors gentle.
Robinson died in 1949. When a statue was erected in 1973 close to the Richmond intersection he’d made secure, it was the primary to honor a Black citizen.