Jones served as the company\u2019s artistic director until 1982. The list of Jones\u2019 former students who went on to successful careers is long \u2014 Broadway star Chita Rivera<\/a><\/strong>, Tony-winning actor and dancer Hinton Battle, choreographer Louis Johnson<\/a>, Sandra Fortune-Green<\/a><\/strong> (who in 1973 became the first African American ballerina to compete at the elite international ballet competition in Moscow) and Charles Augins, chairman of the dance department at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, to name just a few.<\/span><\/p>\n After Haywood’s<\/a><\/strong> death in 1978, Jones continued running the school and the company on her own. Jones, who died in on March 21, 2006, received the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Medal for Outstanding Service in Human Rights, and the Mainline to Stardom award from the Metropolitan Theatrical Society.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sources:<\/b> Though she had never seen a Black ballet dancer at the time, Doris W. Jones was so fascinated by ballet as a young girl that she decided she would make it her life\u2019s work to provide classical dance training to children of color. Denied such training herself, she studied on her own and in 1941, established the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet in Washington DC. The school taught thousands of students and graduated several distinguished alumni, including Broadway star\u00a0Chita Rivera<\/a><\/strong>. In 1961 Jones cofounded the Capitol Ballet, an integrated company that helped to provide roles for Black dancers. Admired as a passionate teacher, Jones played a central role in breaking down race barriers in the world of ballet.<\/p>\n Jones, the daughter of a butcher and a homemaker, was born in the second decade of the twentieth century in Malden, Massachusetts and grew up during the Great Depression. From an early age, she loved dance. She was a talented tap dancer and longed for formal dance training after high school, but college was beyond the family\u2019s means. So Jones made appointments to audition at local dance studios. But when she would arrive and the teachers saw that she was Black, they made it clear that she would not be accepted into their training programs. She often heard this disappointing news in the room where other aspiring students were performing, so she would watch closely to learn as much from them as she could. She also got every book she could find about ballet, teaching herself from what she had seen and read.<\/p>\n Jones found a job teaching dance to students at summer camps in Massachusetts. Her tap dance talents were so impressive that she was invited to go on tour with Bill \u201cBojangles\u201d Robinson, the African American dancer who played a central role in popularizing this art form. But she was not able to take this opportunity, since her parents felt she was too young to go on the road. Eventually Jones was able to persuade one of the dance schools that had rejected her to let her teach tap there, in exchange for ballet lessons. She also taught students in her own studio, which she established in a part of her parents\u2019 house.<\/p>\n After a brief marriage that ended in divorce, Jones moved to Washington DC, in 1940 at the suggestion of one of her students, Claire Haywood. The women became partners with a plan to establish a dance studio. Without enough money to jump start the venture, Jones worked at the Bureau of Engraving to make ends meet during her first years in the city. The Doris W. Jones School of Dance started in a spare room at the YMCA in Northeast Washington in 1941 and moved to several temporary locations before settling in 1950 at a permanent site on Georgia Avenue. At its permanent location, Jones and Haywood renamed their business as the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet.<\/p>\n Jones worked hard to give her students excellent training and a wide exposure to the arts. She invited guest teachers, including\u00a0George Balanchine<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0of the New York City Ballet, to the school and pushed talented students to pursue further training. \u201cThank God she was my teacher,\u201d said Chita Rivera in a\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0article by Sarah Kaufman. \u201cShe was really my foundation. I could not be whatever I am today without Miss Jones.\u201d As Rivera explained, Jones instilled in her students the expectation of excellence and the understanding that inner discipline was required to achieve it. \u201cIt makes your body strong when you\u2019re taught properly,\u201d she noted, \u201cbut it also makes you strong spiritually, and gives you hope to keep going, when you\u2019re taught to be great.\u201d In her autobiographical Broadway show,\u00a0Chita Rivera: The Dancer\u2019s Life<\/i>, Rivera played Jones in a scene that dramatized how the influential teacher took Rivera to New York to audition for Balanchine. Rivera and another of Jones\u2019s students won scholarships to the New York City Ballet\u2019s School of American Ballet, becoming the only two students of color in the organization at that time. Other distinguished alumni of the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, which is now part of the African-American Heritage Trail, include\u00a0Sylvester Campbell<\/a><\/strong>, premier danseur of the Royal Netherlands Ballet Company; Elizabeth Walton of the Paul Taylor Dance Company;\u00a0Hinton Battle<\/a><\/strong>, a Tony Award winning dancer who, like Rivera, went on to study under Balanchine; and\u00a0Sandra Fortune-Greene<\/a><\/strong>, who became the first Black American woman to enter an international ballet competition in 1973, according to the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>.<\/p>\n In 1961 Jones and Haywood founded the Capitol Ballet, an integrated company associated with their school. The company performed classical works such as\u00a0Swan Lake,<\/i>\u00a0as well as original pieces choreographed by Jones. The Capitol Ballet became known for its nontraditional approach, such as putting tap dance to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Financial difficulties forced the company to shut down in 1983, but it reopened in 1988 with a dance honoring Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 inspired the Civil Rights Movement.<\/p>\n After Haywood\u2019s death in 1978, Jones continued running the school and the company on her own.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/Screen-Shot-2021-12-07-at-8.36.34-PM.png\")
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\nOpportunity’s Choreographer Doris Jones Gave Black Students A Toehold in the Dance World, The Washington Post<\/a><\/strong>
\nDoris W. Jones, Encyclopedia.com<\/a><\/strong>
\nCapitol Ballet Guild, Incorporated, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMore About Doris Jones<\/h2>\n
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