Jennifer Jones is the first Black Radio City Music Hall Rockette. Her original interest was to perform on Broadway, but she walked into an audition for the Rockettes and her life changed overnight.
An advocate for women, she also became an advocate for health education after a diagnosis of stage 3 colorectal cancer in 2018, despite being a vegetarian. The diagnosis led her to encourage everyone in the Black community to get health screenings often.
Jones opened up about her experience as a Rockette, the challenges she overcame, and her experience performing at Super Bowl XXII.
What was it like being the first Black Radio City Rockette?
I got to the Music Hall and it was wrapped around with the most beautiful ladies I had ever seen, they were all done up, with long legs, and I didn’t see anyone [who] looked like me on the line. I was about to turn around, and I was going to miss my favorite friend’s jazz class and I went back and forth between staying or leaving. I was just about to walk off the line and go take my jazz class, but something in me said to stay. Now at the time they didn’t tell me initially that they were looking for a Black dancer to integrate the line. There was already an Asian woman on the line, but they were looking specifically for a Black dancer. I found out I was the first Black Radio City Rockette on the 11 o’clock news.
Were there any challenges you faced after integrating the line, and how’d you overcome them?
The owner did not want to diversify the line. He was still alive when I was hired and he was not happy about it at all. So there were people who were happy to have me there, and there were people who were not, and they made that very well-known. I even got some mail from people in middle America who were not happy to have me there. They said I was ruining their holiday season, but I had that voice in me knowing that I was there to do what I wanted to do with my life — that was to dance.
What was it like performing at the 1988 Super Bowl?
It was incredible. It was my debut performance with the Rockettes, it was in a stadium filled with 70,000 people, and it was also televised. So, it was a magnitude of things. Chubby Checker was the headliner, he was the singer, and they had 88 pianos on the field for 1988, 44 Rockettes for 88 legs, and it was amazing. That Super Bowl was historic because Doug Williams, the quarterback for the Washington Redskins, was the first Black quarterback to win a Super Bowl. So, there were two historic moments that day.
