National Black Theatre founder

Barbara Ann Teer, 71, who founded the National Black Theatre in Harlem, died Monday at her home in that New York City neighborhood of what her daughter, Sade Lythcott, said were natural causes.

Teer was a dancer and actor who appeared in Broadway and off-Broadway productions. After becoming fed up with being offered stereotypical roles by white producers, she became an advocate for black artists and black culture.

In 1968, she founded the National Black Theatre, which produced shows, lectures, workshops, classes and exhibits at 125th Street and 5th Avenue. She took a touring company to the Caribbean and to Africa, where she researched indigenous cultures.

“You’ve read ‘Up From Slavery,’ describing how Booker T. Washington worked to build Tuskegee Institute?” she said in an interview with Newsday in 1989. “Well, 100 years later, Tuskegee Institute is still standing. What we are doing is in that vein. We’re building something that adds to the community of African American people.”

Teer was born June 18, 1937, in East St. Louis, Ill. Her mother was a school administrator; her father was a teacher, administrator and businessman who also served in city government. She graduated from high school at 15 and attended Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., where she chafed under the “separate but equal” social practices of the South.

After her freshman year she transferred to the University of Illinois, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in dance education.

She studied dance in Europe, then moved to New York City in 1959.