How Frankie Manning’s incredible dancing skills made him famous twice, 50 years apart

In 1935, a dancer named Frankie Manning won a dance competition with a daring feat: He flipped his partner over his back and onto her feet, the Lindy Hop “air step” that would make Manning, honored in today’s Google Doodle, arguably the most famous swing dancer of all time.

Manning, who died in 2009, would be 102 today. Like a good performance, his career included both a first act and a later revival, bookending a 30-year job and a quiet life at the post office. He started dancing in his teens, and he was still dancing at his 85th birthday party, when he danced with 85 different partners.

But the fact that Manning’s career needed a revival at all — a revival driven mostly by white swing dancers in the mid-1980s — also shows how white Americans embraced black dance steps without always uplifting the people who created them.

Manning, like swing dancing, got his start in Harlem

To understand just how good Manning was at swing dancing, all you have to do is watch him in the 1941 comedy Hellzapoppin’. It’s incredible:

Manning was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and moved to New York in 1917 at age 3 with his mother, part of the vast wave of black Americans moving out of the South in hopes of better opportunities.

What they often found was discriminatory high rents. Rent was exorbitant for black New Yorkers in the 1920s: A study by the New York Urban League in 1927 found that rent for black New Yorkers had doubled since 1919 while increasing only 10 percent for white residents. Black residents had to pay far more than white residents for virtually identical apartments.

In order to make rent, Harlem residents would throw “rent parties” — opening their apartments for live music and dancing, with a cover charge. Manning would attend with his mother, and even as a kid he’d go home and practice in his room, trying to imitate the moves.

When he was 15, Manning started dancing at the Savoy, the only integrated ballroom in New York City. The Savoy was where the Lindy Hop began, a style of swing dance developed in the late 1920s by black performers; it was apparently named after Charles Lindbergh, who’d just completed his solo flight across the Atlantic, and honored him by featuring solo dancing.

Manning became famous for his enthralling, acrobatic work, particularly the aerial moves he incorporated. After he gained fame at the Savoy, he went on a world tour and was featured in Life magazine in 1941.

Get the full story on VOX

How Frankie Manning’s incredible dancing skills made him famous twice, 50 years apart