Here is a ... scholarship possessing funk, rigor and style...It is as sensuous as the artists she describes, employs a zigzagging, swinging approach to her topic and provides a useful guide in our ongoing struggle against the sands of invisibalisation. - Bill T. Jones, choreographer
...a rare and gifted writer, a gem of a cultural portraitist...she teaches us all how to write about dance, the cool and the hot, mind and motion, making it clear how black dance centers self-realization and the moral education of the world. - Robert Farris Thompson, Trumbull Professor of the History of Art, Yale University
With insight and honesty, the author reveals careers limited by racial oppression in the pre-Civil Rights-era US. - Choice
During the 1930s and 1940s, the African American vaudeville team of Norton and Margot danced gracefully in a country scarred by segregation. Their frustrations and satisfactions, emblematic of the lives of so many African American artists in their time, are chronicle with lyrical insight in Brenda Dixon Gottschild's Waltzing in the Dark. - Journal of American History