In the United States, black women have continuously enlivened American modern dance as company directors, designers, choreographers, performers, critics, and scholars. But their contributions to American culture have remained shadowed and poorly documented. This paper will trace some genealogies of black women’s presence in American dance to underscore the prodigious potentials that these artists have enabled for us all. The legacies of more familiar dance artists including Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham will be discussed in relation to achievements and interventions by less‐discussed, but no less important, African American women. In all, these women’s work offer us ways to theorize connectivity in dance. This essay offers evidence of a radical creative tradition within these genealogies, one that has been less widely appreciated, but surely influential in the creation of American concert dance.