But even that term, “hip-hop majorette,” is a recent invention, a hastily applied umbrella description for a tradition of movement defined by dance lines that have fronted the marching bands of historically black colleges since the late ’60s. You no longer have to be an initiate of Southern black college culture - the kin of some insufferably proud Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) alumni annual attendee to a black college classic or homecoming game bystander at a local Juneteenth parade nostalgist for TLC’s “Baby-Baby-Baby” video, or NBC’s A Different World or Spike Lee’s School Daze- to recognize the style of dance performed by hip-hop majorettes. I wasn’t old enough to be leering at grown women like that, and why else would a boy be so transfixed by the dancers, unless of course he was “that way.” Back then, I could only steal glances at the Golden Girls, the majorettes for the band at my father’s alma mater, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The result was almost too sexual to be looked at straight on. These all-women dance troupes combined the energy of the high-step marching style of black college bands with lyrical, West African, jazz, contemporary, and hip-hop choreography. As a boy back in Arkansas, we called them dancing girls.
