Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,135

This is the unmarked grave of Henry Scott.

I don’t know a lot about Scott, so this will be a short one. He’s almost totally forgotten today. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. But he was an important tapdancer in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. He was also black. As such, he faced a ton of discrimination in this nation. Like a good number of black Americans in these years, he found an alternative that was interesting to him. That was the Communist Party. Now, the Communist Party had its limitations on race, as Ralph Ellison skewered so effectively in Invisible Man. But there was no white-led organization in pre-war America that fought harder for civil rights than the CP. None. It was the least racist white organization in American history up to that point, bar none. Among other things, it took on the Scottsboro Boys case when even the NAACP wouldn’t touch a case that had anything to do with sex, even though these were small children being railroaded to death for a sexual “crime” that was completely innocent.

So it makes a ton of sense when people such as Scott would find the CP an appealing alternative to the racist hell of American capitalism. Now, today we all know that the Soviet Union was not good to its own minority populations. But that was far less known in 1928, when he decided to go to Moscow. It seems that he was brought as part of a program to recruit black Americans and show them that the USSR was anti-racist, in order to convince other black Americans to become communists. And it made sense for him professionally to go to Moscow as well. Russia was hardly the center of European culture, but ballet was and remains a serious thing there. He got further training in Moscow and soon found an artistic partner in Alexander Tsfasman, who ran a jazz orchestra based at the Metropole Hotel. Soviet comfort with something like jazz was not very strong and would become less so, but in the early 30s, there was still something of the avant-garde in the USSR.

For much of the 30s, Scott and Tsfasman were popular in the USSR. Americans were pretty fascinated with the Soviets, in a sort of curious-horrified-exotic way and so there was a lot more exchange between mainstream America and the USSR than you’d think, very much including business interests. The Soviets loved Henry Ford, for example. Well, Time magazine came over too and did some profiles of what life was like in Moscow. One of the subjects of 1933 Time piece on this was Henry Scott and his popularity among the Moscow jazz and art aficionados. Later in 1933, Langston Hughes was visiting Moscow. He wrote of Scott as well, saying he was a Cab Calloway-like figure in Moscow, with something of a similar act.

Scott married a Russian woman and they had a daughter named Margie, who would stay in the USSR and later become a lead dancer for the Bolshoi Ballet. But that marriage ended and he remarried, to another Russian woman named Olga Larionova. For reasons I don’t know, they decided to come back to Connecticut. Maybe it had to do with the increasingly puritanism of the Soviet Union or some rejection of the purges, but that’s strictly speculation on my part. It seems that Scott just worked local jobs back home. He might have been famous in Moscow, but he sure wasn’t in America. They had four daughters. But the family situation wasn’t great. His family thought a white Russian must be insane to marry a black man and move to America and so they did not welcome her. He also developed stomach cancer, which killed him in 1945. He was 34 years old.

In 1989, with the Cold War softening, Margie was able to meet her sisters living in the United States and this story was covered in the New York Times.The American side of the family had some sense they had a Soviet sister, but Margie Scott knew nothing of her American family or of her father after he left. A couple of his kids, as it turned out, worked for the Times, which helped the story get attention. Also, after Scott’s death, the children ended up in foster homes for a time. As I’ve said before in this series, that was not super uncommon back then, even if you had a living parent but they just couldn’t take care of you for awhile. Doesn’t mean it was permanent.

Henry Scott is buried in Woodland Cemetery, Stamford, Connecticut.

If you would like this series to visit other black American dancers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Barbara Ann Teer is in Millstadt, Illinois and Don Campbell is in Newhall, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.