It would be hard to overstate the awe I felt when, shortly after the Kennedy Center opened in 1971, my mother took me to a performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. To this day I remember sitting in the dark, watching the great Judith Jaimison perform her signature work in “Cry.” And there she was, almost six feet tall, a Black woman wearing a sweeping white dress and performing moves that, surely, pointed directly the presence of the holy. I was thirteen years old, scrawny, unsure, and adrift in a sense of my own inadequacy. But as I sat, rapt, next to my mother, I knew that in one way or another I wanted to live in service to art, and that, in this service, I too might put a drop of light into a dark world. The dance, and the dancers, were magnificent.

The Kennedy Center: derided as the great breadbox on the Potomac, its opening nonetheless represented a new era in Washington DC. No longer an........

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