Lindy Hop

On May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean. The newspapers called it 'Lindy's hop.' Within weeks, dancers at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem were performing a new, high-energy partner dance with breakaway steps and improvisation. George 'Shorty' Snowden, one of the Savoy's best dancers, was asked by a reporter what the dance was called. He said 'the Lindy Hop.' The name stuck. Whether Snowden invented the name or simply grabbed the headline nearest to hand, the dance had its word.

The Lindy Hop was born in Black Harlem and stayed there for its first decade. The Savoy Ballroom, opened in 1926, was one of the few racially integrated public spaces in New York. It had a block-long dance floor, two bandstands, and a section called the Cat's Corner where the best dancers competed. Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, and Al Minns developed the dance's aerial moves — flips, throws, and lifts that transformed social dancing into spectacle. Manning's first air step, performed at the Savoy in 1935, changed what partner dancing could be.

Hollywood noticed. The 1941 film Hellzapoppin' features a Lindy Hop sequence by Whitey's Lindy Hoppers that remains one of the greatest dance scenes ever filmed. But Hollywood's attention was selective — Black dancers were featured in specialty numbers, then edited out for Southern distribution. The dance went mainstream through white performers who learned it in Harlem and brought it home. The cultural appropriation pattern was already in motion.

Lindy Hop faded in the 1950s. Frankie Manning became a postal worker. The Savoy was demolished in 1958. The revival came in the 1980s, when Swedish dancers found old film clips, tracked down Manning in his seventies, and persuaded him to teach again. He spent the last twenty years of his life traveling the world, teaching the dance he had helped create fifty years earlier. The Lindy Hop's second life was a European import of an American original.