As ridiculous as it now sounds to claim that the African-American body is not suited to ballet, as recently as the 1960s, it was widely believed that black dancers' physiques prevented them from achieving the classical line, and that their feet were too flat for a proper relevé. Arthur Mitchell irrevocably changed that perception. Through his dancing, his vision, his courage to fight the compromise of prejudice, he created the Dance Theater of Harlem, an institution that enriches and expands the world of ballet dancers and their audiences.

There were no black male ballet dancers when Mitchell was born on March 27, 1934. But there were plenty of poor families in Harlem, the Mitchells included. When his father abandoned his wife and five children, Mitchell started shining shoes for money and took over the household budget. At about the same time, he learned to tap dance at the Police Athletic League glee club. But Mitchell didn't see a dance career in his future. In 1968 he told Dance magazine, "As a kid, I was up against what every Negro kid is up against, the widespread attitude that if you're not white, blond, or blue-eyed, you're not part of things."

His defeatist outlook started to change when a junior high school guidance counselor saw 13-year-old Mitchell jitterbugging at a school dance. The counselor convinced Mitchell to audition for the New York High School of Performing Arts, and with a rendition of the Fred Astaire tap number "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails," he won a full scholarship.

Mitchell's gift was obvious to his instructors, as was the direction of his dance future. Though he was studying ballet as well as tap and modern dance, the school staff encouraged him to stick with modern, a genre that readily accepted black dancers. One teacher, however, saw things differently. Mary Hinkson, a black former soloist with Martha Graham's company, spotted a confidence in Mitchell that she believed could transcend typecasting; she urged him to take ballet outside the school. He won a scholarship to the Katherine Dunham School of Dance, where he was trained in ballet technique by Karel Shook (developing a relationship that later became integral to the success of Dance Theater of Harlem). Mitchell also was exposed to Dunham's groundbreaking curriculum.

A highly skilled black dancer with a background in ballet, Dunham was a self-made expert in the anthropology of African dance. Her choreography combined ballet with the dances of different cultures, and she became known as "the first pioneer of Negro dance" as a serious art. At her New York City school, students studied not just dance steps, but the philosophy, sociology and anthropology of the cultures the dances derived from. In James Haskins' "Black Dance in America," Dunham reasoned: "You must know the entire complex, the musical instruments, the rhythms, the songs and what they're used for and how they're used, the language, and the interrelationships among all the elements in this immense cycle that goes with a single dance." Fifteen years later, Mitchell would embrace the same holistic approach at his dance school in Harlem. But first, he had some pioneering of his own to do.

After taking a leave of absence from the School of Performing Arts to dance in Paris, Mitchell graduated from high school in 1952, distinguishing himself as the first male student to win the school's annual dance award. Were it not for Hinkson, he might have accepted the modern dance scholarship that Bennington College offered him. Instead, he chose a scholarship to the premier ballet school in the country, the New York City Ballet's School of American Ballet. Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the NYCB with George Balanchine, openly told Mitchell what my mother later told me: He would have to work twice as hard as anyone else. With determined dignity and simplicity, Mitchell explains his decision in "Black Dance in America": "Ballet is a noble way of dancing. Is nobility a virtue of the white dancer alone, and not of the black?"

There is no physical discipline more rigorous than ballet, and Mitchell says he was ready "to do in dance what Jackie Robinson did in baseball." Parents of his white female classmates, however, weren't nearly as prepared to watch it. Many complained about Mitchell partnering their daughters in pas de deux. Some even objected to his presence in the classroom. The school ignored the protests, as did the company, when Mitchell joined. (Young white girls are the bread and butter of any ballet school, so why would the fledgling SAB risk its financial stability for one student? Here's my theory: Kirstein and Balanchine were dedicated to producing the ultimate American ballet company. Balanchine, raised in Russia, was well-known for his love of all things American, as witnessed in his ballets "Stars and Stripes," "Union Jack" and "Western Symphony." To him, Mitchell not only offered American-bred talent, he also represented a part of the American culture. Balanchine, an unrelenting genius, would not forsake his artistic vision for the benefit of bigotry.)

After two years of study at SAB and a foray on Broadway in Truman Capote's "House of Flowers," Mitchell joined the 7-year-old New York City Ballet in 1955, debuting in a lead role in "Western Symphony." His color was noted -- New York Times critic John Martin called it "a casting novelty" -- but for the most part, dance writers seemed to take Mitchell in stride, praising his abilities. This must have pleased Mitchell, who asked for no publicity about breaking racial barriers when he became a NYCB member: "I wanted to get in on my own merit," he told the Times in 1993.

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