
Frankie Manning's dancing skills made him famous twice (2016) - Tomte
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/26/11776066/frankie-mannings-102nd-birthday
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femto
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Shots_%28dance_companies%29)

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WalterBright
"I just wanted to dance"

What a wonderful man.

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gumby
> "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.

~~~
oh_sigh
How is Sammy Davis Jr explained?

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philosopherlawr
I still celebrate his memory every year on his birthday.

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lambdaphagy
>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.

