When famed flapper Bee Jackson performed the “Charleston” with the Jenkins Orphanage Band
Having built a career dancing the “Charleston” across New York stages in the mid 1920s, Brooklyn-based entertainer Bee Jackson was eager to familiarize herself with the Southern city of the same name. She arrived in the Holy City on the afternoon of April 14, 1926, with her mother, Grace, and the two spent several days touring popular Lowcountry sites, including Magnolia Gardens and the Carolina Yacht Club. On the 17th, Jackson and her white entourage visited Franklin Street for an impromptu performance with the Jenkins Orphanage Band, which had been an early advocate of the original “Charleston” dance moves. Captured on silent film, the footage is noteworthy for featuring both white and Black dancers at a time when much of the city was segregated. While Jackson popularized the “Charleston” after being exposed to it in the Harlem dance scene, the steps are widely believed to have originated as a Black folk dance with ties to the Gullah Geechee people. Jackson would continue to tour and market herself as the queen of the “Charleston” into 1927 and was fondly memorialized by the News & Courier after she died in 1933.
