This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
It is October 1958 and the tap dancer Henry Heard has taken the stage at the Copa Club in Columbus, Ohio, as part of a tour by the Idlewild Revue, which hails from a resort town for African Americans in northwest Michigan.
A slender, elegant man with one arm and one leg, he begins his performance by dancing with a crutch. Less than a minute in, he throws the crutch offstage and continues to dance, to thunderous applause.
In the 1940s and ’50s, Heard was a popular act in the United States and Canada. He danced in the 1948 film “Boarding House Blues” and on the 1950s television’s variety show “You Asked for It,” gaining celebrity in the Black press at a time when Hollywood, television and rock ’n’ roll provided limited opportunities to Black entertainers.
His dancing upended audiences’ assumptions that people with disabilities were incapable of leading fulfilling lives, and he boldly turned a derogatory term, “crip,” into a stage name, declaring pride in his body’s unique power of expression. (The term “crip” has more recently been reclaimed by some in the disability movement to express pride in their identities.)
Heard’s advocacy for people with disabilities didn’t stop there; for years he volunteered with agencies that supported them. He was known to say, “One of my main missions in life is to convince people not to give up.”
Henry Mack Heard was born on Nov. 10, 1924, in Memphis to Lucile (Pollard) and Robert Heard, a cement finisher. Henry always loved music and was inspired by the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, as he told Ebony magazine when it profiled him in 1951.
He learned to dance at age 6 and was performing in clubs by the time he was 14. On Jan. 7, 1939, the car he was riding in with his group, the Three Dots, was struck by a train at an unguarded crossing in Memphis. Everyone in the car was killed except Henry, who suffered devastating injuries that necessitated the amputation of his right arm and right leg.
After multiple surgeries, he thought his life as a dancer was over and was tempted to give up. But he resolved not to. “I’d seen the blind and the crippled standing on street corners with their tin cups and pencils,” he told The Columbus Star in 1958, “and decided that I wanted to do more with my life than be the object of public curiosity and pity.”
Heard credited Gip “Sandman” Roberts, a comedian and singer, with encouraging him to train to dance again. He initially danced with a woman before taking off as a solo act in nightclubs and in a revival of a variety tent show, “Silas Green From New Orleans.”
While Heard found a place in variety shows that could seem like relics of vaudeville, his musicality evoked the styles of sophisticated tap dancers like Chuck Green, Bunny Briggs and Baby Laurence, individualists who played with the rhythmic surprises of bebop.
His innovative dancing was on display in “Boarding House Blues,” which starred Moms Mabley as the owner of a cash-strapped boardinghouse. To raise money, the tenants hold a show, and Heard is the opening act. He starts by using his crutch as he dances a Charleston step accompanied by Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra. He then slides his crutch offstage at the end of a turn and keeps on dancing, sculpting accents in the air with his free arm and punctuating a drum break with backward steps.
Heard’s tossing off his crutch was part of his theatricality, said Constance Valis Hill, a professor emerita of dance and performance at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. “He’s definitely in control of the gaze,” she said. “He’s got the audience completely in his hand.”
She added: “You look at his feet and the arm and the hip. You forget that there’s no other arm or leg. You’re just looking at the beauty of the instruments he’s playing with. He’s a full-body dancer.”
Heard appeared at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Club Alabam in Los Angeles, the Howard in Washington, D.C., and Club DeLisa in Chicago, variously sharing bills with Della Reese, Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker. When Club Juana in Detroit wanted to bring in top bands, it hired Heard as the emcee for jazz luminaries like Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie. He sometimes sang, once performing a duet with the blues performer Gladys Bentley.
Wherever he traveled, Heard entertained patients at hospitals, including veterans hospitals, refuting the prevalent attitude that people with disabilities were charity cases to be pitied. He appeared at community events held by the N.A.A.C.P. as well as at Democratic Party fund-raisers, and he founded a long-running annual Christmas benefit for children at the Illinois School and Rehabilitation Center in Chicago, often using his own money for gifts and dinner and dressing as Santa.
Heard was one of a number of African American tap dancers, like Peg-Leg Bates, Big Time Crip and Jesse James, whose artistry made percussive use of a mobility aid.
“There was a place for people who were entertainers,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, emerita professor of English and bioethics at Emory University and a leader in the field of disability studies, said in a phone interview. She added, “They were able to have jobs when many people with disabilities were simply locked up and institutionalized.”
Audiences loved Heard’s acrobatic mastery of balance, his speed and the versatility of his dance steps, from Boogie-Woogie to mambo. Thomas DeFrantz, a professor of dance and Black studies at Northwestern University, said Heard excelled at the swivel step — a component of the Charleston, the Suzie Q and some of James Brown’s moves.
“Heard finds so much rhythmic variation in it,” Professor DeFrantz added, by phone. “He gives us accents, cross-rhythms and downbeats, and little side rhythms. We get all of this through him manipulating his weight and his foot. And the performance is wrapped up with his own cool.”
On the TV variety show “You Asked for It,” Heard peppered three rapid-fire numbers with pyrotechnics: in the first, he interspersed double-time steps with triplets and trenches; in the second, he finger-snapped his way through a joyous rumba. For his finale, he tapped up and down stairs à la Bill Robinson.
He eventually settled in Chicago, married, had children and got divorced. He enjoyed tennis, swimming and bike riding.
In 1959, Heard was robbed on his way home from a nightclub, and, in early 1960, he fell, suffering a fractured skull and shoulder as well as a damaged ear drum. Though prominent Chicago friends held a benefit for him, work grew scarce.
In later years he worked as a ward clerk for the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation and volunteered for the Goodwill charity, the Social and Rehabilitation Service in Washington and the Illinois Board of Rehabilitation. All the while he criticized such organizations for “taking advantage of the disabled” by giving them demeaning jobs and paying them a pittance.
“They’re all very polite and want me to volunteer my services,” he told The Defender in 1971. “But no one is interested in hiring me to work full time with the people who need help. In fact, there just aren’t any substantial programs moving in that direction, and the handicapped, as a result, continue to struggle for the few ‘charity’ jobs they can get.”
He died at his home in Chicago on Sept. 11, 1991, after a long illness. He was 66.
Heard would likely be pleased that many cutting-edge artists today are redefining both dance and disability through inclusive choreography and design. As Garland-Thomson, the Emory scholar, said, “His distinctive moves anticipated the work of Axis Dance Company, Kinetic Light, Abilities Dance Boston, and Krip-Hop Nation,” groups that produce performances by people with disabilities and improve access for audiences.
Meisha Rosenberg is working on a biography of the early 20th-century jazz musician Chick Webb. Her essay about him appears in the forthcoming anthology “Freak Inheritance,” co-edited by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.
