Jacqueline Amos Hendy, a social worker and professional dancer who performed in Broadway and Off Broadway productions from 1944 to 1954, died on Sept. 13 in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. She was 104 and had long split her time between Manhattan and Azurest in Sag Harbor.
Mrs. Hendy “was a quiet force,” her son, Thomas Henry Amos IV, said.
She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944, having studied with the influential psychologist Abraham Maslow, and was admitted to the Columbia University School of Social Work. “Her acceptance was deferred for a year due to racial quotas,” her son said. When she did graduate, she worked for the Bureau of Child Guidance at public schools on the Lower East Side and at the School for the Deaf on East 23rd Street.
At the same time, she pursued a dance career, traveling widely throughout the United States with the Pearl Primus Dance Group. She danced on Broadway in the original “The King and I” with Yul Brynner, in “My Darlin’ Aida,” and in “Finian’s Rainbow,” and studied with Sophie Maslow at the New Dance Group.
“She recounted stories of ‘passing’ to be hired for Broadway and enduring segregation when traveling with dance groups across the United States in the 1940s and 1950s,” her son said.
She continued to take dance classes later in life, including weekly flamenco classes well into her 80s at Ballet Hispanico.
After retiring, she was a volunteer lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was also involved with National Smart Set, an organization of Black women founded to help underprivileged African-American children.
She maintained a rental business in her Upper West Side brownstone, where she lived from 1967 until her illness about 10 years ago.
Jacqueline Cortelyou Hairston was born on Dec. 18, 1921, in Brooklyn, and grew up there. Her father, Harry Hairston, was a Pullman porter. Her mother was the former Annie Goodwyn.
Her first marriage was in 1957 to Thomas Henry Amos III, a prominent Harlem physician who was among the first to buy land and build in Sag Harbor’s historically Black Azurest neighborhood in 1947. Azurest “was her haven,” her son said. Dr. Amos died in 1963.
She married Abel Farnum Hendy on March 15, 1966. He was a civil engineer for the City of New York Buildings Department and owned RightWay, a construction company in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, after his retirement. He died in 1992.
Having traveled widely with both husbands and on her own with educational groups, she had been to Turkey for an archaeological dig, to Japan, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Haiti, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, and to the Pacific Northwest.
Mrs. Hendy enjoyed international and classical music, made a point of traveling to New Mexico for the Santa Fe Opera Festival, and “valued education and the protected independence of the fourth estate to hold power to account.”
Her son lives in Ossining, N.Y., Sag Harbor, and New Orleans with his wife, Dr. Julianne K.J. Suojanen. Also surviving are her stepchildren, Henrietta Hendy of Houston and Dr. Abel Hendy and his wife, Lynne Hendy, of Harlem, and a stepgranddaughter, Kristyn Doar Page. She also leaves three nieces, Doe-Ann Powell, Troy Powell, and Ardath Hill, two great-nieces, Marissa Hill and Kimberly Hill Keyes, a great-nephew, Mark Parks, and her “dearest friend and extended family member,” Eloise Anderson of Manhattan.
An older sister, Lavinia Rae Parks, died before her.
A memorial celebration will be held at a later date. Her son has suggested donations in her memory to WNYC at wnyc.org or the United Negro College Fund at give.uncf.org.
