May Day Queen

I was queen of the festivities and, like so many things in the colored world in which I was raised it was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance. As a kindergartener, I did not racially mark this moment because whiteness was immaterial to me, but this would not be so for long as more history was to be made.

1. The bunny hop is a popular novelty dance of the 1950s and 1960s, with a song.

2. May Day: Spring festival recognized as a public holiday celebrated on May 1st commonly celebrated at Negro schools. See May Day: America’s traditional radical, and complicated holiday, Part I. National Museum of American History.

3. Can can is a creolin and tulle slip worn to create bellowing skirt, most often worn under fancy dresses for girls.

4. Afro-American Life-Insurance Company founded in 1901 by Abraham Lincoln Lewis and his associates. A.L. Lewis, b. 1865 – 1947, would be Florida’s first black millionaire. In 1935, he purchased 200 -acre tract along the Atlantic Ocean, which he named American Beach, It was a thriving vacation spot for African Americans, from the 1930s to the 1950s. American Beach including homes, beach rentals, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses.

5. Ariel is a character in Danish fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Andersen first published in 1837. The character was popularized in the 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid. In the original tale, to walk and to dance on her new legs caused excruciating pain, as if daggers.