Birth of Katherine Dunham

Katherine Mary Dunham was born on June 22, 1909, in a Chicago hospital, though she spent much of her early childhood in nearby Joliet, Illinois. She was the daughter of Fanny June Guillaume, a woman of French-Canadian and Native American descent, and Albert Millard Dunham, an African American businessman whose own father had been enslaved.

Dunham's early life was marked by the loss of her mother when she was young, and she was raised for a time by relatives while her father remarried. These formative years, split between different households and cultural influences, would later inform her lifelong fascination with family structures, ritual, and community across the African diaspora.

Her birth marks the beginning of a life that would fundamentally reshape American dance, blending rigorous anthropological scholarship with groundbreaking choreography. Dunham would go on to become one of the most influential dance pioneers of the twentieth century, credited with bringing African and Caribbean dance forms into the vocabulary of American concert dance, founding one of the first Black dance companies in the United States, and using her platform for decades of civil rights and humanitarian activism. Her birth in the early twentieth-century American Midwest set the stage for a remarkable journey spanning anthropology, the arts, and social justice.