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Katherine Dunham, black dancer, a pioneering dancer and choreographer, author and civil rights activist who left Broadway to teach culture in one of America’s poorest cities, has died. She was 96. The East St. Louis, Ill., resident had been preparing to move home permanently at the end of the month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday. The cause of her Sunday night death was not revealed.

Dunham was perhaps best known for bringing African and Caribbean influences to the European-dominated dance world. In the late 1930s, she established the nation’s first self-supporting all-black modern dance group. “We weren’t pushing `Black is Beautiful,’ we just showed it,” she later wrote.
She began the Dunham Dance Company and during a cross-country tour, sued hotels in Cincinnati and Chicago for racial discrimination. She began the Katherine Dunham School of Arts and Research in New York in 1945 and later moved to Haiti, where she set up a medical clinic and was honored for her service there.

Moved by the city’s impoverished state, she proposed what would become the Katherine Dunham Dynamic Museum and Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts and Humanities.
“What we are trying to do is break through apathy,” she was quoted as saying. “It’s not so much teaching people to perform as it is teaching them, through performing, that they have individual worth and can relate to other people.”

Dunham’s New York studio attracted illustrious students like Marlon Brando and James Dean who came to learn the “Dunham Technique,” which Dunham herself explained as “more than just dance or bodily executions. It is about movement, forms, love, hate, death, life, all human emotions.”
In her later years, she depended on grants and the kindness of celebrities, artists and former students to pay for her day-to-day expenses. Will Smith and Harry Belafonte were among those who helped her catch up on bills, Ottley said.
“She didn’t end up on the street though she was one step from it,” Ottley said. “She has been on the edge and survived it all with dignity and grace.”