Ruth Beckford

From "Alice Street," the film

When one thinks about Ms. Ruth Beckford (Dec. 7, 1925-May 8, 2019) she sees a queen. If Alvin Ailey is a King, then certainly Ms. Beckford is her Majesty. An Oakland native, she graduated from Oakland Tech, then UC Berkeley.  She was often the first or only Black girl or Black woman body on stage in company's like Anna Halprin Dance Company. Here is a link to the Ruth Beckford Papers.

Ms. Beckford studied with Katherine Dunham and based her instruction on the Dunham Method. She was also wrote many books about her life and several plays. She was certainly an artist's artist.

Ms. Beckford probably lived as long as she did because she used the beauty of art to show young kids in Oakland how to make their lives beautiful beyond their imaginations, certainly beyond the imagination of structural racist paradigms.

She used her black woman body to illustrate the practicality of the notion, Black is Beautiful. Dance was for "every body" literally, especially black children. When Ms. Beckford was hired by Oakland Parks and Rec. she used the arts as a tool to teach life skills, a philosophy her mentor Katherine Dunham also used in her work. Dance was not entertainment, it was a way of life.  As an activist, Ms. Beckford was instrumental in the first Black Panther Party Breakfast Program at St. Augustine Church. She spoke often of how she and her team got local businesses to donate food to the program which volunteers would pick up and then she and others would cook and serve the meals to the children and (I believe some parents). This was the start of the free school meals programs in California and the rest of the nation. Unfortunately, nutrition is no longer the guiding principle in this program.

When hired by Parks and Rec., Ms. Beckford Oakland became the first city in the nation to have performing arts for in its recreation centers. Among her students was Deborah Vaughn, co-founder of Dimensions Dance Theatre.

Whenever I went to see Dimension Dance Theatre, Ms. Beckford was there. I remember when she started a Friends of the African American Museum and Library. One of her first projects was to interview elder Oakland residents. There was a lovely film created from those interviews. She has a Ruth Beckford Museum Gallery at Geoffreys Inner Circle which is open by appointment. In the lovely tribute written by Brenda Jones, she says that she did not want an memorial. I would presume, Ms. Beckford wanted all her flowers to surround her while she could still smell them (smile).

Here is an interview with Ms. Beckford: https://archive.org/details/caolaam_000089

Museum of Performance and Design, Legacy Online Oral Tradition Library: Ruth Beckford