settle into a home for a few years. However, after her father remarried, Albert Sr. and his new wife, Annette Poindexter Dunham, took in Katherine and her brother. The family moved to a predominantly white neighborhood in Joliet, Illinois. There, her father ran a dry-cleaning business. Dunham became interested in both writing and dance at a young age. In 1921, a short story she wrote when she was 12 years old, called "Come Back to Arizona", was published in volume 2 of The Brownies' Book. She graduated from Joliet Central High School in 1928, where she played baseball, tennis, basketball, and track; served as vice-president of the French Club, and was on the yearbook staff. In high school she joined the Terpsichorean Club and began to learn a kind of modern dance based on the ideas of Europeans [Émile Jaques-Dalcroze] and [Rudolf von Laban]. At the age of 15, she organized "The Blue Moon Café", a fundraising cabaret to raise money for Brown's Methodist Church in Joliet, where she gave her first public performance. While still a high school student, she opened a private dance school for young black children. Academia and anthropology After completing her studies at Joliet Junior College in 1928, Dunham moved to Chicago to join her brother Albert at the University of Chicago. During her time in Chicago, Dunham enjoyed holding social gatherings and inviting visitors to her apartment. Such visitors included ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Redfield, Bronisław Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Fred Eggan, and many others that she met in and around the University of Chicago. After noticing that Katherine enjoyed working and socializing with people, her brother suggested that she study Anthropology. University of Chicago's anthropology department was fairly new and the students were still encouraged to learn aspects of sociology, distinguishing it from other anthropology departments in the US that focused almost exclusively on non-Western peoples. The Anthropology department at Chicago in the 1930s and 40s has been described as holistic, interdisciplinary, with a philosophy of liberal humanism, and principles of racial equality and cultural relativity. Dunham officially joined the department in 1929 as an anthropology major, while studying dances of the African diaspora. As a student, she studied under anthropologists such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Sapir, Melville Herskovits, Lloyd Warner and Bronisław Malinowski. Under their tutelage, she showed great promise in her ethnographic studies of dance. Redfield,