Native American Lovers

Chadwick Boseman, beloved star of Black Panther, passed away on August 28, 2020, at age 43 after a private four-year battle with stage IV colon cancer. He continued filming major roles while undergoing treatment, passing away at home in Los Angeles with his wife and family by his side💔 Kobe Bryant, the 18-time NBA All-Star and Lakers legend, died at age 41 in a helicopter crash on January 26, 2020, in Calabasas, California. The crash occurred in foggy conditions, killing all nine people aboard, including his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. The group was traveling to a basketball game.🕊

Untitled, Watts, California, 1967⁠⁠⁠

Ray Curtis Petty Jr. became the first lawyer in his family after overcoming doubt, discrimination, personal loss, and failing the bar exam on his first attempt. His inspiring journey from Albany, Georgia, to passing the bar and seeing his mother’s viral reaction is a powerful story of perseverance and faith. ⚖️💛

Coy Dumas Jr. retired after 51 years of service as Atlanta’s longest-serving MARTA bus driver, safely transporting millions of passengers with remarkable dedication. Known as “Badge #1,” his legacy of commitment and community impact continues as he plans to mentor future drivers. 🚌👏

Mother and Children, Mobile, Alabama, 1956⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get ready for the ultimate glow up story you never saw coming. Derrick Parker is not just another Harvard Law grad—he’s the pride of Kansas City, a first-generation college student who crushed every single milestone on his way to the top. From serving on the Black Law Students Association executive board to killing it with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, his determination is absolutely electric. But it does not stop there. This Morehouse College valedictorian racked up powerhouse internships everywhere from the U.S. House of Representatives to Bank of America, dazzling everyone with his unstoppable drive. Parker is racking up honor societies, academic awards, and a fan following that just wants to see what he will conquer next. If you are hungry for a success story packed with hustle, pride, and historic firsts, Derrick Parker just dropped the blueprint. This is what happens when you refuse to accept anyone else’s limits. All eyes are on what he does after this headline-making run!

In May 2021, Dr. Dóminique Kemp completed his doctorate in mathematics at Indiana University — becoming the first Black person in the program's history to do so. He did this while navigating what many Black students in elite STEM doctoral programs describe as one of the more isolating dimensions of the experience: being the only Black student in the program, without peers who share your background navigating the same environment alongside you.Mathematics at the doctoral level is a field defined by abstraction, sustained intellectual difficulty, and a culture that has historically been resistant to examining its own demographic patterns and the barriers embedded within them. The pipeline of Black mathematicians at the PhD level remains narrow — not because of any deficit in mathematical talent or interest in Black communities, but because of the accumulated weight of under-resourced K-12 mathematics education, the absence of mentorship from Black mathematicians in many academic settings, and the specific psychological tax of being the only person who looks like you in rooms where you are supposed to feel intellectually at home.Dr. Kemp completed that journey. After Indiana University, he continued with postdoctoral appointments at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study — two of the most prestigious mathematics research institutions in the world.He has also used the platform his achievement created to advocate for diversity in STEM — working to change the conditions that made him a first rather than one of many.First Black PhD in mathematics from Indiana University. Postdoctoral work at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Kemp changed the record and then kept going.

Untitled, Kansas City, Missouri, 1950⁠⁠⁠⁠

Houston, Texas (1980s). Photographs by Geoff Winningham

Betty White told the entire American South to go to hell over a Black tap dancer in 1954, and she never even told him she did it. Arthur Duncan found out decades later that the woman who launched his career had been fighting for him behind his back the whole time. For most of his life, Arthur Duncan was eight years younger than he actually was. Every biography, every press kit, every television credit listed his birth year as 1933, and he never once corrected it. It wasn't vanity. It was survival. When he died on January 4, 2023, at ninety-seven years old in a care center in Moreno Valley, California, his wife Carole finally told the truth. He was born in 1925, not 1933. She said he never corrected the date because he never wanted to discuss anything personal. A man who spent seven decades under stage lights kept the most basic fact of his life hidden, because a Black performer in mid-century America understood that the less they knew about you, the safer you were. Arthur Chester Duncan came into the world on September 25, 1925, in Pasadena, California. He was the sixth of thirteen children born to James Alfred Ernest Duncan, a merchant seaman who'd settled in Southern California, and Corabel LaMar. His siblings would go on to serve in the military, work in banking, fight fires, teach school. Arthur was the one who couldn't sit still. At thirteen, two friends from McKinley Junior High School pulled him into a dance quartet. He didn't want to do it at first, but they insisted, and something clicked the moment his shoes hit the floor. His father believed in it enough to volunteer at the local dance studio so Arthur could take lessons at a discount. A father mopping floors so his son could learn to shuffle. Arthur started selling newspapers on a Pasadena street corner, doing a few tap steps between sales to earn extra change from passersby. He used the newspaper gig to slip into fine restaurants where performers from the Pasadena Playhouse ate dinner, and sometimes those performers noticed the kid with the fast feet. A woman who ran a local nightclub gave him his first real shot. No contract, no guarantees, just a boy with a talent and a door cracked open. He studied under Willie Covan and Nick Castle, two of Hollywood's finest dance coaches, and Castle became the bigger influence, shaping Duncan's musicality. Henry Mancini, years before he became one of the most famous composers in the world, created musical arrangements for Duncan's routines free of charge. Arthur's father was practical, though. Talent was fine, but a Black man needed a profession, so Arthur enrolled at Pasadena City College to study pharmacy. The stage wouldn't let him go. He dropped out. He served in the Army during World War II, where he spent much of his time performing for troops. After his discharge in 1946, he chased dance work wherever it existed and went to Australia on a ten-day job that turned into four years. In Australia, he was offered his own television show and turned it down. He said he was too young and inexperienced for that kind of responsibility, which is remarkable when you consider that he was actually in his late twenties, not the teenager his official biography suggested. The eight phantom years followed him everywhere, giving him a cushion of youth that made his energy seem natural instead of extraordinary. Nobody questioned it because nobody questioned a Black performer's paperwork. His television debut came in 1951 on The Jerry Colonna Show. Three years later, a woman named Betty White changed everything. White was thirty-two years old and already a force, having worked her way up from co-host of a Los Angeles variety show and launched her own program on NBC as both host and producer. In 1954, that was almost unheard of for a woman. She had creative control, and she used it. Duncan auditioned for The Betty White Show and won her over with a performance of "Jump Through the Ring." By November 1954, a Los Angeles Times editor noted that the fan mail was pouring in demanding more of Arthur, and he was now a permanent member of Betty's cast. Then NBC took the show national, and the letters from the South started arriving. Television stations across the Jim Crow South threatened to boycott the network if White didn't remove her Black performer. It wasn't a suggestion but an ultimatum, wrapped in the economics of advertising and the politics of segregation. The network told White to drop him. She refused. What she said became legendary, though it took decades for the full story to surface. In a 2018 PBS documentary, she recalled that all through the South there was this whole ruckus about taking the show off the air if they didn't get rid of Arthur, and her response was simply that he stays and they could live with it. Then she did something that went beyond defiance. She gave him more airtime and wrote back to the stations saying they used Arthur Duncan every opportunity they could. Here is the part that will sit with you. Arthur Duncan didn't know any of this was happening. Betty White fought for his career, risked her show, stared down an entire region's worth of television executives, and said nothing to the man she was protecting. He found out decades later and said he was flabbergasted. That's the kind of allyship that doesn't perform for an audience. The show couldn't survive the pressure, failing to attract sponsors likely sabotaged by brands unwilling to touch the controversy. The Betty White Show was canceled on December 31, 1954, and in February 1955 it became the shortest-running program ever to receive an Emmy nomination for Best Daytime Program. But Arthur Duncan was no longer invisible. Betty White had put him on national television, and you can't unsee someone once you've watched them dance. In December 1957, he became the first Black performer to join Bob Hope's hundred-member USO troupe, touring military bases worldwide alongside Jayne Mansfield, Jerry Colonna, and the Les Brown orchestra. He performed in Pearl Harbor, Korea, Okinawa, and Guam, calling it the best thing he could have done to help his country. After the USO, he spent years performing across Europe. Then, in 1964, Lawrence Welk's personal manager Sam Lutz discovered him and brought him on as a guest. One appearance was all it took. Welk offered Duncan a permanent spot in his "musical family," making him the show's only Black performer, a position the Library of Congress would later call unique and risky. The risk was real and daily. In an era when Black and white performers didn't hold hands on camera or suggest anything beyond professional distance, Duncan was often seen standing in the background during large cast numbers, carefully positioned so he didn't appear to be "with" any of the white women. He danced on that show for eighteen years, from 1964 to 1982. He was introduced every week as the man who's keeping tap dancing alive, and in many ways that was the literal truth. The art form was dying around him. Big bands gave way to rock bands, jazz clubs shrank, and Broadway moved on. Dance historian Rusty Frank later noted that during the 1960s, there were only two shows on television where you could see tap dancing every week. One was Friday's Talent Round-Up Day on The Mickey Mouse Club, and the other was Sunday night with Arthur Duncan. He kept it alive by showing up, week after week, year after year, in front of millions of living rooms that might never have seen a tap dancer otherwise. He kept the rhythm going while the rest of the world forgot it existed. Ralna English, a longtime singer in the Welk troupe, remembered that some audience members were not thrilled to have a Black person on the show. She heard it, she said, and some of those older people were deeply prejudiced. Duncan chose to overlook the slights. He had a lot of pride, English remembered, always dressed to the nines, never had a bad word to say about anybody. Fellow dancer Skip Cunningham, who is also Black, watched Duncan from afar before they became friends. He was safe for them and safe for us, Cunningham said, and they couldn't have picked a better person. That phrase holds a century of Black performance in it. The calculation every Black artist had to make, how to be excellent without being threatening, how to be present without being too present, how to let your feet do the radical work while your face stayed pleasant. It only eased in the later 1970s, when Duncan finally performed dance numbers alongside Mary Lou Metzger and Anacani. After nearly two decades on the show, he was allowed to dance next to the women. When The Lawrence Welk Show ended in 1982, Duncan didn't stop. Francis Ford Coppola cast him in The Cotton Club in 1984, and then in 1989 Nick Castle Jr., the son of the very man who had trained Duncan decades earlier, asked him to dance in the film Tap alongside Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr. Duncan kicked off the famous challenge scene where the old masters showed their stuff. The boy whose father mopped studio floors so he could learn from Nick Castle was now being directed by Nick Castle's son. In 1988, he danced at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall in an evening billed as a tap dancer's summit, alongside Savion Glover, Gregory Hines, Bunny Briggs, Jimmy Slyde, and Howard "Sandman" Sims. He danced with Hines again that same year at Carnegie Hall. The honors kept coming: the Flo-Bert Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, the Living Treasure in American Dance Award in 2005, honors at the Saint Louis Tap Festival in 2006, and the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame in 2020. A 2003 Telethon performance choreographed by Jason Samuels Smith even won an Emmy. In 2017, on Steve Harvey's show Little Big Shots: Forever Young, Duncan got to see Betty White one more time. He was ninety-two years old, though the world thought he was eighty-four, and she was ninety-five. He danced for her, and then she surprised him by walking onto the set. The audience watched a man in his nineties hold the hand of the woman who had quietly saved his career sixty-three years earlier. Jason Samuels Smith said it best after Duncan's death. He was a reminder that the art form never died, that it would always live somewhere, through someone's feet. Arthur Duncan's feet carried him from a Pasadena street corner to Carnegie Hall. They carried him through a world war, through Jim Crow, through eighteen years of standing carefully in the background so white America could get comfortable with his presence. His wife said he was performing until the end, still looking for gigs the month before he died. Ninety-seven years, not eighty-nine as the world believed. The eight years Arthur Duncan erased from his life tell you more about what this country asked of its Black artists than any speech ever could. He didn't hide his age out of vanity, he hid it because disappearing just enough was the price of being allowed to stay. And he stayed. Betty White made sure of it first, and then Arthur Duncan made sure of it himself. I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link: Every coffee helps me keep creating.