1949 - Bill Robinson, who performed using the stage name Bojangles, passes away in New York City. A tap dancer, actor and singer, his career progressed from minstrel shows to vaudeville, then on to radio (where he popularized his catchphrase “everything’s copacetic”), Broadway and a recording career, and finally becoming a star on TV and in Hollywood musicals. He is today best remembered for dancing with Shirley Temple in a series of films in the 1930s. Robinson’s signature routine was the “Stair Dance,” in which he rhythmically tapped up and down a staircase - an act so renowned and copied that he attempted to patent it. A highly in demand performer, he became the most famous and highest best paid black entertainer of his era - but despite that, Robinson died penniless and his funeral was paid for by longtime friend Ed Sullivan.

FUN FACT (well, not so much a “fun fact” as a “reason why Robinson deserves special credit”) - he used his fame to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers, such as becoming: One of the earliest black performers to perform solo, overcoming vaudeville's infamous “two-color rule”... and one of the first minstrel/vaudeville performers to perform as black without wearing blackface makeup... and one of the earliest black headliners on Broadway, including becoming the first black performer to headline a mixed-race Broadway production… and the first black performer to appear in a Hollywood film in an interracial dance number (with Shirley Temple in 1935’s The Little Colonel)... and for leading and supporting a number of causes to fight racial prejudice in his private life as well.