Frankie Manning's dancing skills made him famous twice (2016)

Interestingly it was a bunch of Swedes, the Rhythm Hot Shots[1], who contacted Frankie Manning in the 1980s. The dance classes that Frankie Manning did in Australia in the early 2000s were a blast.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Shots_%28dance_companies%2...

"I just wanted to dance"

What a wonderful man.

> "Are you kidding?" he said. "Frankie Manning should be a household name. He should be revered. He was every bit as important to American dance as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. But he was black. He went as far as he could go, but it wasn’t far enough.

It's not like things have changed much today.

I still celebrate his memory every year on his birthday.

>These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.

Of course, as we all know, the more enduring the stereotype, the more likely it is to be false. Given that Arab explorers were describing Africans in strikingly similar terms a millennium ago, we must conclude that these views are nothing short of the distilled essence of error.