Remembering Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates
Legendary tap dancer Clayton “”Peg Leg”” Bates was born in 1907 in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. His mother was a sharecropper and housecleaner. Clayton began dancing on the street for pennies and nickels when he was five years old.
At 12, while working in a cotton mill, his left leg became caught and mangled in the cotton gin. As a poor black person in the segregated South, he could not go to a hospital; his leg was amputated on the kitchen table at his home.
Returning home after World War I, his uncle Wit made him his first peg leg. Clayton quickly taught himself to dance on his artificial leg, and was performing in Broadway shows by the time he was 20. He became renowned for a move called the Jet Plane: a huge leap, with a perfect landing on his wooden leg.
Soon an international sensation, Peg Leg Bates gave two command performances before the King & Queen of England, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show 22 times.
In 1951 he and his wife opened th’e Peg Leg Bates Country Club in New York’s Catskill Mountains, the largest black-owned-and operated resort in the country. Throughout the rest of his life, he continued to perform and teach for children, senior citizens, and people with disabilities.
He worked in many segregated schools in the South, among them Fountain Inn Negro High School, where he taught both of Glenis Redmond’s parents. Peg Leg Bates died in 1998, at the age of 91, in Fountain Inn-just a mile-and-a-half from the place where he lost his leg.
I’m currently writing a book about the extraordinary life and legacy of Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates, an internationally renowned one-legged tap dancer from Fountain Inn, South Carolina, who broke barriers in the world of entertainment.
If you have any connections to Peg Leg Bates or stories about his resort in Kerhonkson, NY, I would love to hear your stories. Let’s ensure his remarkable story continues to inspire future generations.
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