Highlights from America's Black Broadway

Under her tutelage, Howard offered the Howard student body a variety of dance classes, which expressed her philosophy for improving black women's self-esteem by exploring the uniqueness of black beauty through the definition of body aesthetics in which rhythmical movement, or dance, was an essential component. In 1927, she founded the Howard University Dance Group, which has progressed into the Howard University Dance Ensemble. The 1952-53 Dance Constitution stated as its aim to "allow the members to know and experience dance as a creative and [sic] experience, expressing her emotions to her environmental impressions, at the same time to train the body to become strong, flexible, sensitive and well-coordinated, capable of responsibility to the messages of the mind." (11)

Allen implemented an infrastructure that eventually allowed many students an opportunity to study under the guidance of local and national teachers and to dance at the collegiate level. Among the famous dance personalities who benefited from a Howard University dance experience were Debbie Allen (though she was in the fine arts versus physical education curriculum), Chuck Davis, Melvin Deal, Ulysses Dove, George Faison, and numerous others who later became instrumental in teaching dance in public schools and recreation centers. In the 1990s, Howard became the first historically black college or university to implement a dance major. The vision, though coming to fruition after Professor Allen's death in 1993, was undoubtedly aided by her undying commitment to dance at Howard University.

The dance professor was not only dedicated to art of dance but also to the art of life and all that it entailed. As a black university, Howard was deeply involved in the African American struggle for the equality under the law. Maida Withers, a dance professor at George Washington University, remembers her experiences in the early 1960s as a white professor on Howard's campus and how Allen's presence and strict discipline added to the overall environment: "I'd lived in Utah and I'd lived in Indiana.... But ... you know, I'd have to say that I was not as aware--as I became aware--as I lived longer in Washington. I was teaching at Howard the first year I moved to Washington, D.C., so I was learning a lot and I was learning fast. But I didn't make the contribution, I think, to self-actualization that I might have been able to make if I had stayed there longer. But I will say I was learning tremendous[ly] from Maryrose Allen and from the students, and my own sort of: I guess just learning from the students about their own experiences and their own values. And that was a very big transition period; it was very intense. And in some profound way Maryrose Reeves Allen represented the past not the future, and so there was a lot of struggle there I felt within the university and within that department from her sort of rigid, you know, approach to structuring to sort of inevitable expression when there's more openness and acceptance of diversity." (12)