Dancer Katherine Dunham; Formed Black Ballet Troupe

"When Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson came weeks later, they didn't have to play to a separated audience," she later told a reporter.

For decades, a home she kept in Haiti doubled as a medical clinic and music hall. When she was 82, she went on a 47-day hunger strike to protest a U.S. government decision to send back Haitians on boats fleeing starvation and repression. Only the intervention of then-deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide persuaded her to end her fast.

Katherine Mary Dunham was born in Chicago on June 22, 1909, and raised in nearby Glen Ellyn, Ill. Her father was a tailor, her mother a school administrator of French-Canadian and American Indian lineage. After her mother's death in 1913, her father bought a dry cleaning business, remarried and moved to Joliet, Ill.

Ms. Dunham published a short story in a magazine edited by W.E.B. DuBois at age 12 and was class poet in high school. She later wrote a memoir, "A Touch of Innocence," and several volumes of published anthropology, including "Journey to Accompong" and "Island Possessed."

As a child, she put on a fundraising "cabaret" for a church and wanted to dance in school. "I wanted to be a fairy in a pink tutu up on my toes, but I was always a brownie in the woods," she once said, blaming racial stereotyping.

In 1928, Ms. Dunham moved to Chicago to study ballet with Ludmilla Speranzeva, one of the few teachers who welcomed black dancers. Through Speranzeva, she was introduced to Latin, Balinese and East Indian dance and made crucial connections with dancers Mark Turbyfill and Ruth Page.

Her Ballet Nègre, a black ballet group formed with the white Turbyfill, had an unpleasant start when landlords refused to lend rehearsal space for their venture. Their enterprise was short-lived, although it did result in a performance of their "Negro Rhapsody" at the Chicago Beaux Arts Ball in 1931.

About that time, she formed the Negro Dance Group with Speranzeva's backing; appeared in Page's ballet "La Guiablesse" ("The Devil Woman"), based on a West Indian legend; and danced at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair with a revived Ballet Nègre.

Meanwhile, Ms. Dunham enrolled at the University of Chicago and was influenced by her studies with anthropologist Robert Redfield. In 1935, the year before her graduation, she won a Julius Rosenwald Fund grant to study Caribbean dance, ritual and folklore. In Haiti, she performed a dance routine featuring Spanish castanets, the music by Debussy and a "Fire Dance" that concluded with the release of doves.

In 1938, she choreographed her first full-length ballet, "L'Ag'Ya" -- a story of lust and revenge that ends with a Martinique fighting dance. She also created a raunchy contemporary duet called "Barrelhouse" and a Brazilian piece, "Bahiana," showing a woman who becomes increasingly entangled in the ropes of dockside weavers.

An early career highlight was "Cabin in the Sky," in which she was Ethel Waters's wicked rival for Dooley Wilson and sang such suggestive songs as "Honey in the Honeycomb." She was replaced by Lena Horne in the film version. Ms. Dunham was also a minor player -- dancing a tropical number in a dream sequence -- in "Stormy Weather" (1943), in which Horne starred.

Over the years, Ms. Dunham was dance director on the Abbott and Costello comedy "Pardon My Sarong" (1942), as well as "Casbah" (1948), "Mambo" (1954), the Amazon-set "Green Mansions" (1959) and John Huston's "The Bible" (1966). In the latter, she conceived and choreographed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.