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He was a 57-year-old Black man, she was six years old and white. Together, they danced into history as the first interracial tap-dancing couple in 1935’s The Little Colonel. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson called Shirley Temple his “darlin’.” He was “Uncle Billy” to her. They would act and dance in three other films – The Littlest Rebel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Just Around the Corner. While Robinson was a star onstage in minstrel shows and vaudeville, he did not become famous as a Hollywood movie star until his collaboration with Temple.

Donald Bogle, in his history of Blacks in American film, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, calls Robinson “the Cool-Eyed Tom” because many of his earlier film roles were confined to subservient Black servants of white masters. Although he became famous at the height of segregation and Jim Crow laws, Robinson made the choice to accept these roles. In so doing, however, he achieved the stature that allowed him to be instrumental in breaking barriers – he refused to wear blackface, and broke the “two-colored” ru

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Entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s original name was Luther Robinson. He was born on May 25, 1878, to Maxwell, a machinist, and Maria Robinson, a church choir director, in Richmond Virginia. Both parents died tragically in 1885. Robinson did not like his birth name, Luther, and forced his brother, Bill, to exchange names with him. Robinson and his younger brother, who changed his name to Percy, were raised by their grandmother, Bedelia Robinson, a former enslaved person. As a young man, Robinson earned the nickname “Bojangles” for his happy-go-lucky, enthusiastic personality.

Robinson began his entertainment career performing as a song and dance man, referred to as a “hoofer” at that time, in Richmond beer gardens. In 1886, around the age of nine, he joined Mayme Remington’s touring troupe. By 1891 Robinson joined a traveling vaudeville company, where he performed skits. In his teens, Robinson joined various traveling companies and vaudeville tours, slowly building up a reputation as a comedian in nightclubs and other musical venues. In 1908 he met Marty Forkinsm who became

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Over sixty years after his death, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson is still the most famous tap dancer who ever lived. Robinson was the first black single dancer to star in white vaudeville circuits and he was a headliner for nearly thirty years. He got top billing at the Palace in New York, and he played command performances for kings and presidents.This first full-length biography reveals the charmer, gambler, brawler, athlete, and consummate entertainer behind the crusade for actors' rights, who pushed past the color barrier in the first half of the twentieth century. Haskins and Mitgang, with access to many of the people who knew Bojangles best, and to his scrapbooks and personal papers, have created a vivid portrait of the man behind the myth, from his birth in Richmond, Virginia, to his death and the star-studded funeral where he was eulogized by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Ed Sullivan.When people talk about famous American freedom fighters they talk about Rosa Parks, a brave woman who took a seat in the front of a bus and broke it down. They talk about Rev. Dr. Martin Luthe