February 22nd, 2021

Alvin Ailey was born on January 5, 1931, in Rogers, Texas. He was a dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). Throughout his career, Aliley merged theater, ballet, modern dance, and jazz with Black vernacular, creating hope-fueled choreography that continues to spread global awareness of Black life in America. Ailey's choreographic masterpiece Revelations is recognized as one of the most popular and most performed ballets in the world. In this work, he incorporated elements of primitive, modern, and jazz dance to express a concern for Black rural America.

Ailey’s first exposure to concert dance was a 1946 performance by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium. Three years later, his classmate and friend Carmen De Lavallade brought him to the Melrose Avenue studio of Lester Horton - one of the first racially integrated dance schools in the US. Horton became his mentor and Ailey joined Hortnon’s dance company in 1953, making his debut in Hornton’s Revue Le Bal Caribe. That same year, Horton suddenly died of a heart attack and Ailey went on to take over as artistic director and choreographer. In the decade that followed, he performed in four Broadway shows, including House of Flowers and Jamaica.

In 1968 Ailey was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada. A year later, along with the Martha Graham Dance Company and choreographer Pearl Lang, Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center with the aim of providing access to arts and dance to under-resourced communities. They started off with just 125 students in Brooklyn. Today, now known as The Ailey School, it is one of the largest places in New York City committed to training dancers.

Throughout his career and life, he was awarded numerous honors, including the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1977 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 1988 in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to American culture. In 2014, he posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his contributions and commitment to civil rights and dance in America. In August 2019, he was one of the honorees inducted in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQIA+ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields."

Ailey passed away on December 1, 1989. The New York Times wrote of him, “you didn’t need to have known him personally to have been touched by his humanity, enthusiasm, and exuberance and his courageous stand for multi-racial brotherhood.”