Color Coded

John Garfield’s suggestion that singer Herb Jeffries darken himself up wasn’t the only instance of color-consciousness in the production of “Jump for Joy” (“When the ‘A’ Train Hit L.A.,” by Emory Holmes II, April 25). Jeffries may have been too light-skinned; another performer’s skin color proved too dark.

If you look at the opening-night program for the show you’ll note the name of a chorine by the name of Frances Neely (sic). But Nealy never made the cut. The night before “Jump” opened she was replaced by a dancer of equal or perhaps lesser skills whose lighter skin color was more in keeping with the era’s ideas of what constituted (in the words of an Ellington song) “Black Beauty.”

Even in this plea for social parity, racism worked its wiles. Nealy, who died in 1997, went on to become one of the country’s great tap dancers but never quite got over this slight.

BILL REED

Los Angeles