Richards & Pringle's, Rusco & Holland's Big Minstrel Festival, circa 1898. Source: Library of Congress

Burnt Corks & Cakewalks

The Toxic Legacy of Blackface in American History

03.22.19

Ed, Nathan and Brian explore the history of blackface, from its heyday as the most popular form of entertainment in America to its afterlife in the controversial images that appear in college yearbooks. What explains the long life of blackface in American culture?

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this show, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

blackface; entertainment; minstrelsy; popular culture; stereotypes

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In early 2019, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was embroiled in a political scandal regarding his use of blackface in a 1984 yearbook photograph. The photograph, from his time at Eastern Virginia Medical School, showed a person wearing blackface standing next to another person wearing a Ku Klux Klan uniform. The ensuing fallout from this revelation brought blackface and its presence throughout US history back to the forefront of American discourse.

This lesson focuses on the enduring history of blackface in American culture. It emerged as a byproduct of minstrel shows following the American Civil War. Used as a form of mockery and vehicle for promoting racial stereotypes, minstrelsy was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the late 19th century.

This unfortunate legacy continued into the 20th century. Though there are countless examples of blackface used in various forms of entertainment, the Backstory episode highlights the legacy of blackface in the Mummers Parade. This Philadelphia New Year’s Day tradition is one of the oldest folk festivals in the United States. It also has a history of explicit racial overtones and blackface. This legacy was challenged during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, leading to a conflict between African American groups and event participants. Though blackface was officially outlawed from the event in 1964, examples of racism, sexism, and bigotry have endured. Though the history of the Mummers Parade has an undeniable connection to blackface and racial stereotypes, thousands of people look forward to watching and participating in this annual tradition. Many of these participants have no knowledge of the history of the event.

This lesson forces students to confront questions about the racist underpinnings of American culture. Can respected traditions of American culture be separated from their racist undertones? How does the legacy of blackface still permeate American society?

Segments

The Mardi Gras of the North

Every year huge crowds flock to Philadelphia to celebrate New Years Day. Brian talks with historian Rhae Lynn Barnes about the blackface roots of one of the city’s most unique traditions – the Mummers Parade.

Philadelphia; blackface; celebrations; parades; tradition

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan Connoll: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Nathan Connoll: If you’re new to the podcast, along with our colleague Joanne Freeman, we’re all historians, and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

Ed Ayers: We’re going to start today’s show in Philadelphia where huge crowds gather on Broad Street to celebrate New Year’s Day. Amid the excitement, onlookers strain to catch a glimpse of the extravagant costumes, lively performances and elaborate floats of one of the city’s most unique traditions, the Mummers Parade.

Brian Balogh: New Year’s Day marks a very special event in Philadelphia, an event that transforms a lot of ordinary people into a famous tradition. On that day, they become Mummers, climaxing months of top-secret planning, practicing and drilling. On New Year’s Day, some 15,000 Philadelphia Mummers will strut their stuff on the streets of the city. Visitors come from far and wide to see this unique spectacle.

Brian Balogh: Founded in 1901, the Mummers Parade has been a beloved Philadelphia tradition for over a century. Participants are organized into clubs that compete in four distinct categories, string bands, fancies, comics, and wench brigades, but according to scholar Rhae Lynn Barnes, the history of the Mummers Parade isn’t all fun and games. She says, “These categories have roots that can be traced back to slavery and blackface minstrelsy.”

Rhae Lynn B.: The first are the string bands, and they basically practice banjo classics, which are the minstrel standards, year-round, and the banjo, of course, is the iconic instrument in pretty much all minstrel shows.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Rhae Lynn B.: They not only have to collectively play the banjo, but also do a pretty elaborate choreography while marching. The second division is called the fancies or the fancy brigade divisions. These were added a little bit more recently and, once again, it’s pretty steeped in American slavery and blackface, so the term now is casually used to suggest that the props, that the costumes are very elaborate and fancy, so I would encourage you to imagine very bright colors, highly structured outfits, but also a lot of headdresses, so things that you would see in Mardi Gras, and they perform in these four-and-a-half minute productions, and they’re evaluated on their showmanship, but what I mean in terms of it has a complex history as an Antebellum America in the inner state and the domestic slave trade.

Rhae Lynn B.: The term fancy was used to designate light-skinned, young, black girls who were traded and sold in a slave trade as … I’m hesitant to use the word “enslaved prostitutes” because they obviously didn’t get the profits from their sex acts, but they were essentially seen as light-skinned sexual prizes.

Rhae Lynn B.: The third is the comic division, and this is basically exactly what it sounds like. It’s blackface comedy routines, or at least from most of the century that meant blackface comedy routines, and there’s an amazing photograph in the Temple University archives of members of the Jack Hine Old Timers Mummers Club in 1929 in the Mummers Parade. City Hall is receding in the background, and there are 11 blackface minstrels performing in the street for thousands of cheering onlookers, and they’re all wearing impeccable tuxedos.

Rhae Lynn B.: It’s hard to tell in the black-and-white photograph, but the tuxedos appear to be golden, complete with the top hat, the oversized bow. These are, once again, the iconic house slave uniforms that are typical of end men in minstrel shows, and they’re wearing golden tap shoes or slippers, and the photograph is taken by someone who’s clearly run into the street in front of them on the parade route, and they’re holding their canes horizontally in front of them mid-torso, and you can tell that they’re about to shift their way and launch into this choreographed step or strut for the cakewalk.

Rhae Lynn B.: Finally, the last group are the wench brigades. The mulatto wench is an iconic character in minstrel shows that’s, once again, always performed in blackface and drag, and, also, there’s a lot of fire brigades in a lot of amateur blackface shows, and so it’s playing on that.

Brian Balogh: From its very inception, the Mummers Parade was intertwined with depictions of blackface, but, in 1963, city officials finally took measure to stamp it out. That’s when parade director Elias Myers issued a statement banning blackface and teamed up with a recreational commissioner to broadcast an announcement on television. This, suffice to say, did not go over well with many of the Mummers faithful.

Rhae Lynn B.: These two men immediately become targets of vigilante violence and picketing, so this usually means that hundreds of people who are pro-blackface surround their homes, in this case, the Myers’ family home, and they taunt and cheer and they throw bottles, and they’re very vocal that, essentially, this would be the first time in its 64-year history that the parade would ban blackface, and they personally interpreted that as encroaching on a family tradition, on ethnic cultural expression and, ultimately, harming what they saw as Philadelphia’s most unique party and artistic celebration.

Brian Balogh: Heritage.

Rhae Lynn B.: Yeah. Exactly. Just as with normal blackface, that it’s seen as a true American contribution, something that’s uniquely ours, and so Myers tries to immediately alleviate some of this tension. He basically points out, “Okay, well, you know, there actually isn’t an anti-blackface city ordinance. There’s not a state law. You can wear whatever makeup you want in America, but if anyone gets out of line, I’ll act,” but as the vigilante violence increases, he basically says like, “Listen, I don’t have the power. The city has no law against minstrels. I can’t have you arrested.”

Brian Balogh: In response to Myers’ capitulation, the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality worked together to undermine the upcoming 1964 Mummers Parade. Adopting a strategy of nonviolent protest, both organizations threatened to form a human chain on the parade route and staged a sit-in at a local television station.

Rhae Lynn B.: While this is happening, Charles W. Bowser, who’s the attorney for the local NAACP, quietly goes to court where … while both of this, the court, human chain threat is happening and also this actual television sit-in, goes to court and tries to get this injunction against blackface. He basically argues like, “Listen, we’re taxpayers, too, and we don’t believe in our money going to depict African-Americans in sort of an unfavorable light, a way that’s taunting and humiliating.”

Rhae Lynn B.: This basically sets off a 72-hour delay of the parade, so it’s pushed back until Saturday, and the court basically asked for the Mummers and the Civil Rights workers to come together and do the difficult work of trying to find a resolution here. Ultimately, in the end, two judges decide in 1964 that they will not ban the blackface, basically saying that there’s no legal cause, there’s no law on the book. Despite the fact that the NAACP is pretty successful in showing how this violates city equality laws, especially issues with the tax prices, the judge rules that the Mummers are “a fine tradition in Philadelphia.”

Rhae Lynn B.: Immediately, over 800,000 nationwide NAACP members pledge that they will not watch the parade, they will not buy any products from anyone who’s sponsoring the parade, but 1965 is really the year that we have a resolution.

Brian Balogh: As Philadelphia grappled with blackface, the US was reeling from widespread racial turmoil. Police brutality escalated hostilities as incidents like the Watts riot and the New York race riot sent shock waves throughout the country. Philadelphia was a time bomb of racial tension, and the 1965 Mummers Parade was poised to set it off.

Rhae Lynn B.: In this incredible moment of racial unrest, in 1965, the NAACP corps and the Mummers are all brought to court by what was known as the Pennsylvania Council of Churches, and they file an injunction against both the parade and the Civil Rights demonstrators, and they basically say, “This has now reached the point where Philadelphia is so unsafe,” and that there is going to be a race riot, that they need a court granted injunction to prevent this impending riot, and so, as of 1965, the Mummers officially announced that they will discontinue the use of blackface, and the NAACP corps really interpret this as a victory against blackface for civil rights because it is no longer officially sanctioned.

Rhae Lynn B.: As you can guess, it doesn’t actually officially kill it. There’s examples in the 1980s and the 1990s where it continues, but, in terms of being sanctioned by the city, it officially ends in 1965.

Brian Balogh: What do you say to those who would argue, “Well, this is done in fun,” or, “This is kind of a timeless folk tradition?” What is your answer to that?

Rhae Lynn B.: I think the most complicated thing to separate out is, yes, of course, this is an American tradition. These songs are handed down intergenerationally, and that makes people have an intense emotional attachment to it, and I do think the other complicated thing is the fact that the Mummers performers are incredible performers. These costumes are astounding. The choreography is incredibly complex, but I do think that we can completely enjoy parades and New Year celebrations and also artistry both in the forms of costumes and musical entertainment without evoking these negative caricatures and also this really dark and complex history that, quite honestly, hurts a lot of people.

The Malevolence Of Minstrelsy

When minstrelsy emerged during Antebellum America, it became a big hit with audiences right away. Historian Rhae Lynn Barnes offers background to what a minstrel performance looked like back when it was the dominant form of entertainment, and how the racist messages tied to minstrelsy changed according to evolving social politics across the country.

Music:

Bespoke by Todd Gauthreaux

Antebellum Era; entertainment; minstrelsy; performance; racism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan Connoll: Today on the show, we’re going to revisit the history of blackface and minstrelsy in the United States. We’ll hear more about what a blackface minstrel show looked like when it was the main form of entertainment in the 19th Century.

Ed Ayers: We’ll also discuss how the legacy of minstrelsy influences the way people view costumes and blackface today.

Brian Balogh: We’ll take a look at how the University of Virginia is uncovering its yearbook’s racist imagery. Last month, you may have heard our short program about this very topic. That show was released after the controversial photo surfaced from Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page. The page included a picture of one person wearing blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. In that show, we talked with scholar Rhae Lynn Barnes, and we just heard her speak about the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia.

Nathan Connoll: We’re going to play a shortened version of our first conversation with Barnes in order to give more context on what a minstrel show looked like back when it was the dominant form of entertainment. If you’d like to hear the full interview, we encourage you to check out the show called The Faces of Racism at our website, backstoryradio.org.

Nathan Connoll: Barnes is an expert on amateur blackface minstrelsy, so I asked her to define what exactly that is and how it’s different from a professional minstrel performance.

Rhae Lynn B.: Professional blackface minstrel shows were the number one form of entertainment in the 19th century, and it was primarily focused in New York City and the northeast, and they would annually, primarily in summers, do nationwide tours. It was a small cohort of global blackface celebrities who really were the powerhouse of blackface entertainment. However, after the Civil War, a lot of these professional minstrels, in a moment when we have technological advances in printing technology, photography, start to create a new genre called amateur blackface minstrelsy, which was primarily how-to blackface guides that were meant for everyday Americans to learn how to represent stereotypical African-Americans and perform blackface themselves.

Rhae Lynn B.: Why this is important is it switches where blackface takes place from the theater where the majority of Americans are sort of passive consumers of this genre, to proliferating to schools, fraternal orders, churches, youth groups, and everyday Americans are no longer just the consumers, but they are the participates. They are writing the scripts. They’re purchasing and selecting songs. They’re learning how to play it on the piano. They’re mastering how to perform tap dance. They actually have to physically draw the exaggerated eyes and mouth on their own face. They have to learn how to walk stereotypically, talk in dialect, and so that really creates an embodied knowledge of this art form that previously did not exist.

Nathan Connoll: What kinds of things are happening in the shows in terms of the stereotypes, of the themes or even the physicality of the performances that make them such a sensation?

Rhae Lynn B.: They often have three acts. The first act is called The First Part, and it’s basically a musical comedy show, so, at the beginning there would be a parade where the minstrels would go through the audience and they would try to get the audience on their feet, to be stomping, to be clapping, to completely be immersed in this experience, and then the interlocutor, who is sort of the combination of a ringmaster and a slave master, would announce, “Gentle, be seated,” and there would be a half circle on the stage, and the men who were donning blackface would sit down simultaneously. They were often dressed in red, white and blue outfits, so there was this intimate link to Americana and patriotism and this racial performance from the very beginning.

Rhae Lynn B.: They would be sitting in a half circle, and, on the ends of each half circle, you would have what’s called the “end men.” End men would play the bones, which is an instrument, or the tambo, the tambourine, and that’s were the two characters get their name, Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones. The interlocutor is the straight man for the end men who do typical jokes and dialect, like, “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side,” things that we think of as very classic, childhood, iconic jokes and songs.

Rhae Lynn B.: The number one composer was Stephen Foster, so a lot of songs like Oh, Susanna, Camptown Races, Old Black Joe, My Old Kentucky Home. These are the songs that are being sung. They’re very romantic ideas about southern life and slavery with really gruesome and horrific lyrics, so they’re really commenting on contemporary political stories.

Rhae Lynn B.: I tell my students sometimes to imagine it as a combination of a midnight screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Daily Show. It’s a completely wild situation where the audience is encouraged to participate. Everybody knows the songs. Everybody sings along. People dance, but, at the same time, you’re getting political commentary.

Rhae Lynn B.: The second part is often called the Oleo. This is where we have stump speeches, which are primarily stand-up comedy routines where a single person would do a “Bobalition” speech, which is black dialect, which is a made-up language for an abolition speech, so they are specifically lampooning abolition and black politicians during both Antebellum and Reconstruction and taking on major themes of the day, so one of their favorite things to make fun of is actually temperance, and so you would have a politician who would be going on and on in these completely illogical rambling dialect speeches and making a fool of himself to completely ridicule black politicians, but, at the same time, they’re also making fun of white women, so it’s very much a masculine affair, a pro-white masculine affair.

Nathan Connoll: How were women represented in the minstrel shows?

Rhae Lynn B.: Whenever you have a woman represented on stage, it’s a white man in blackface and also drag, and they typically wore padding during Reconstruction to represent the mammy figure, but, during Antebellum America, they actually were really sexual. They were normally called the mulatto wench, and I think that that’s a really important thing to take note of because, during slavery, the United States, obviously after the slave trade closed down, had to focus on reproducing slave labor, and that include a lot of sexual violence against African-American women to force that reproduction of the slave population, and so, in minstrel shows, during Antebellum America, before the Civil War, black women were always portrayed as sexy seductresses.

Rhae Lynn B.: However, after the Civil War, it completely flips. They become obese. They have to cover their hair in kerchiefs. They are completely desexualized, and so I think that that’s an important thing to track and pay attention to in blackface minstrel shows in terms of how the stereotypes are reacting to what is happening in African-American freedom struggles both in terms of the politicians they’re making fun of and also African-American women as they gain rights.

Nathan Connoll: What does the third and final act of the minstrel show look like?

Rhae Lynn B.: The third part is basically a short play or routine, and, in between these sections, I should say they’re interspersed with Stephen Foster songs or other blackface dialect music of the time. They tended to be very sentimental, songs about loss, and I think this is part of why the shows when they spread out of New York City are so relatable to people, because, in the mid-19th century, it’s really a moment where a lot of people are separated, whether they are immigrants who came to New York, if they’re people who moved west to try and pursue gold or if they were trying to create a new life somewhere else, and so then we have this at the height of the Civil War as well when we have millions of people who are displaced, and so, all of a sudden, these songs that are supposed to be articulating longing and displacement from African-American slaves who are sold throughout the American South suddenly begins to voice this longing and displacement that white people are experiencing, but through blackface in really confusing and complex ways.

Nathan Connoll: Now, many people might not be aware of the fact that what we understand as a 19th and 20th Century institution, Jim Crow Segregation draws its name from the minstrelsy character of the early part of the 19th century, and I’m curious, given what you’ve already outlined about the relationship between violence or portrayals of even violent themes in the music, how we’re to understand why Jim Crow came to define the form of legalized segregation in America.

Rhae Lynn B.: One thing that I think is really interesting is 1896 is the year that we get Plessy v. Ferguson, which federalizes and permanently entrenches mass segregation in the United States. It’s also the same year that we have projected film for the first time in New York City, and so segregation, Jim Crow as an era, and issues a racial representation in mass culture are intimately linked from the beginning.

Rhae Lynn B.: Jim Crow takes on a really interesting metaphorical role during this era because Jim Crow was essentially a buffoon. He speaks in dialect. He is supposed to be dim-witted. He is supposed to love and adore his life in slavery, highly romantic about how in slavery this sort of pro- slavery ideology that slaves were given free housing, they were given free food, they just sauntered through the fields all day and sang, and so he’s a very destructive stereotype because he represents African-Americans as being happy-go-lucky and bumbling through life and carefree, when that’s really the exact opposite of what is happening during Jim Crow America.

Nathan Connoll: I have to imagine that, especially after the end of the Civil War, that there’s really an explosion of the usage of Jim Crow among whites, given their anxiety about African-Americans’ new status as freed men.

Rhae Lynn B.: Yeah, and it’s also important to remember that he has a counterpart, Zip Coon. Zip Coon is the urban dandy representation of African-Americans, and so, during Reconstruction and post-Civil War, he really takes off because of the stereotypes that are shifting for African-Americans especially as we see a mass migration of freed black African-Americans who are moving to places like Atlanta and then throughout the 20th century as we have the great migration, when 6 million African-Americans move north and move west, to places like Chicago.

Rhae Lynn B.: In the amateur form, Zip Coon is renamed Rastus, and he’s basically this sexually aggressive, domineering, very leering character who is in the city. He’s always wearing mismatched clothing, but tries to dress very sophisticated. Both Jim Crow and Zip Coon have this sort of constant stereotype that, no matter how desperately they try to integrate into white America or be professional or be successful, they always just get it slightly wrong, and that’s why they’re so funny, that it’s comical every attempt to assimilate and professionalize, and so it’s really entrenching or crystallizing African-Americans as something that’s backwards, something that’s affiliated with the south even when they’re clearly not anymore.

Nathan Connoll: You’ve written that blackface has “proved to be a hard cultural habit to break.” I’m curious, given your perspective on this art form, in the long view what you imagine is necessary or possible in terms of breaking the habit relative to blackface.

Rhae Lynn B.: One of the things that I think is ironically happening is we have Americans who are really concerned about blackface. They know that this is taboo. They know that this is wrong, but we’ve lost the language and the through line to articulate why this is so upsetting and jarring and wrong, and so the answer to me is really we need to openly talk about and teach the history of blackface.

Rhae Lynn B.: There has actually been a series a series of high school teachers in the United States in the last 20 years who lost their jobs simply for trying to teach the history of blackface, and I don’t mean teachers who were showing up in blackface on campuses, but, literally, just lecturing on the history of blackface. It was so censored and seen as so taboo, we didn’t even have conversations, and so then you do have younger generations who don’t understand some of the negative things that they physically embody.

Rhae Lynn B.: The way it crops up right now is a lot of times costumes of hiphop artists or hiphop parties, and so some of these younger students don’t understand the longer lineage of what they’re doing, but we all know the song lyrics to Oh, Susanna. We all know why did the chicken cross the road. There are these cultural touchstones. That takes the cake. It was a cakewalk. All of these things are very intense references to the minstrel show tradition that we don’t fully understand exactly because we’re not teaching it in schools, and so my hope is that American cultural history and its importance and its direct connections to legal systems, political structures and systemic white supremacy will be taken more seriously and integrated into the curriculum.

Nathan Connoll: Rhae Lynn Barnes is a history professor at Princeton University. She’s also the author of the forthcoming book, Darkology, When the American Dream Wore blackface.

What’s Underneath The Costume

Even though minstrelsy faded as a mainstay of stage entertainment, its legacy of racist caricatures has persisted into the present. Seemingly every Halloween, pictures go viral of white people donning blackface for costumes. In fact, about a third of Americans believe it is always, or at least sometimes, acceptable for a white person to wear blackface for a Halloween costume, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. But even if a white person claims they are darkening their skin “out of respect,” the disturbing history behind the use of blackface is hard to deny. Nathan talks with scholar Eric Lott about the line between racial appropriation, appreciation and mockery.

Music:

Driftwood by Podington Bear

Halloween; caricature; colorism; cultural appropriation; minstrelsy

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Ed Ayers: Amidst news last month surrounding his yearbook page, Ralph Northam admitted to darkening his face to resemble Michael Jackson for a dance contest in 1984. Soon after Northam’s admission, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said he, too, wore blackface in 1980 for a costume of another African-American musician, rapper Kurtis Blow.

Eric Lott: For a white person to have known about and have been interested in Kurtis Blow in 1980 indicates a discerning taste on the part of that person. I was a little impressed. That doesn’t defend by any stretch at all his having put on blackface.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Eric Lott: Putting on blackface is, at least to my mind, always highly racially offensive even when it’s done in apparent affection or appreciation of African-American culture.

Ed Ayers: That’s scholar Eric Lott. He studied the history of blackface minstrelsy for decades and its ripples through modern popular culture. He says the behavior of Northam and Herring in the 1980s represents white folks wanting to express an interest in black culture.

Eric Lott: … but needing to protect yourself as it were with the racist mask. That mask, I mean, that’s always been the [inaudible 00:27:07] all the way back into the 1820s and ’30s. It handles cross-racial interest on the part of whites in a way that manages it, contains it, makes it safe by adding a dose of ridicule at the same time as it expresses fascination, and to have to do that as late as 1980s or, indeed, the present day is a mystery.

Ed Ayers: Lott is right to clarify that this isn’t an old phenomenon. Seemingly every Halloween, photos go viral of white people donning blackface mostly for costumes of prominent black celebrities. In fact, a recent study by the Pew Research Center said about a third of Americans think it is always or at least sometimes acceptable for a white person to wear blackface for Halloween. The same study revealed that white adults are about twice as likely as black adults to say blackface for a Halloween costume is acceptable. The survey was conducted mostly before the Northam news broke.

Ed Ayers: I talked more with Lott about current attitudes around blackface. We also discussed how the legacy of minstrelsy has influenced black folks’ presence in the entertainment industry and the fine line between artistic appreciation, appropriation and mockery.

Eric Lott: I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules or lines one can draw. It’s a case-by-case argument or debate. Many people whose opinions I respect have written off Elvis as simply an imitator or a thief, and it seems to me that, taken all around with all the materials he was putting together to produce his work and his persona, he managed to do something fresh and interesting. There’s a charisma there and a dynamic and a certain kind of dynamite that he managed to put together. There seems to be some kind of class element that redoubles or over-determines or inflects the racial … the obvious racial borrowings so that there’s a tilt back in the direction of personal or individual expression as well as appropriation.

Eric Lott: Ralph Ellison posed these problems so well. There is no cultural location in the United States that is untouched by African-American culture. The real melting pot is of disparate African and post-African cultures melded into a brand new world culture in the new world, and that new world post-African culture has influenced everyone in the United States so that, as Ellison put it, most white Americans are significantly African-American many times without realizing it.

Eric Lott: At the same time, that incredibly mixed and melded culture is handled in racist and segregated ways obviously so that the two kind of thrusts coexist of mixing and of segregation or separation, and Ellison’s fine image of the young, white kid at a Klan rally with a transistor radio up to his ear blasting Stevie Wonder, and that really is a situation right there.

Ed Ayers: Let’s go back and talk about the history of blackface minstrelsy specifically, and I’m wondering if you might consider it the opening moment where white people began to at least recognize black folk as having a culture. Obviously, there’s black folk as property, but black folk as vessels of culture. Is that really the first time that this happens in American life?

Eric Lott: It is in entertainment form, yes, in order to put the show on in the first place and for white audiences in significant numbers, and it’s a big hit right away, to go to these shows, made visible and public and collective and commercially profitable the notion that there were such things as African-American dance, songs, humor that existed, and, although they did their best to deny it, right behind that lies the notion that, wait, these are actual human beings with complicated and fascinating cultural practices. There are all kinds of ways, of course, all kinds of languages whites used to degrade, to dismiss, to devalue a black man’s ways of being and association in the world, but, even if subterranean, there was some recognition there.

Ed Ayers: Now, concurrent with minstrelsy’s emergence in the north in the 1830s, and really it’s mainstreaming by that time, you have, at the same time, African-Americans who can act and who are in theater, but, as their participation expands in the theater, they’re almost bound by the fact that minstrelsy has become through the 1850s, 1860s, certainly, by the late 19th Century, one of the most widely acceptable, widely loved forms of performance, and so to what extent does this ramping up of minstrelsy basically box in what black performers can do?

Eric Lott: I think it really does box them in, and it’s both the ticket to public performance and a severely restricted space that which to perform, starting with the fact that when African-American performers take the stage in significant numbers after the Civil War, they have to put on the blackface mask and they had to do things that proceed according to showbiz routine so that they’re recognizable, but, right away, it would seem to me that, when you have African-American performers in blackface, they’re doing all kinds of complicated things at once, and there’s all kinds of ironic gestures one might make toward the very mask that one is being forced to wear.

Ed Ayers: Give me an example.

Eric Lott: The donning of the mask for white audiences is just expected. What might have even been more fascinating, the mask reminds everybody that everything is under control here, and it’s the same brand of entertainment that we’re familiar with and everything’s going to be fine, but black performers, George Walker, Bret Williams later in the 19th Century and the early 20th Century are making reference to the notion that … They had a show called Two Real Coons, and so the idea is, like, okay, you’ve seen the facts, these are the real ones, but they’re in blackface …

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Eric Lott: … immediately, in the very title of the show, [ironizing 00:33:24] the idea of blackface, and they have to put on blackface because here’s the real thing, and so you can imagine the ironic winking, even if they’re actually winking, that’s going on to black audiences and to the hipper white patrons who understand that this is all a kind of performative rules just to allow black performers on the stage.

Ed Ayers: There’s a double and triple act that the blackface artist has to basically perform. You’ve got basically a century of blackface performance from 1830s through the 1930s, and as much as we all wish that you could have a dozen Dave Chappelles exploding, the stereotypes playing a pimp or a crack head or a black, white supremacist, there are many, many more examples of blackface’s visual grammar basically being replicated without the paint, and how do we make sense of that or even locate when that’s happening?

Eric Lott: Just through debate, it seems to me. The big offender in recent years is Tyler Perry, and I think there’s a fair amount of debate about that. Didn’t Spike Lee take issue as they say with …

Ed Ayers: Right. I think that might be right …

Eric Lott: … with Tyler Perry?

Ed Ayers: … and did a whole film about blackface, Afterlife, with Bamboozled. Right?

Eric Lott: Exactly. Exactly, and that really is … I mean, now that you mentioned it, that really is … and visual grammar is really the perfect phrase for locutions that don’t seem to harken back to this tradition, but that actually speak the same language, so that I think performers might think that they’re eluding that template or trying to work with it and work beyond it, but the grammar is the same.

Eric Lott: Bamboozled, much of it, Spike Lee maintains a sense and puts forward in very interesting ways the way in which the framing, visual and performative, of blackface, extends to the present day and, unfortunately, delimits what black performers can do. I mean, that’s an interesting … this crazy conceit that, okay, then we’ll just do a minstrel show so as to produce a flop so that the TV producer can get out of his contract and go do something else because he’s so sick of producing television. It winds up an unintended hit.

Ed Ayers: You raised a very powerful question and, really, a through line, again, across this century now and after, which is that so much of the minstrelsy story and its various permutations really is about how profitable it is, and, thinking about the mass acceptability and marketability of hiphop culture, sports, outfits, it sounds at least that there’s a connection here between minstrelsy as a really important piece of profitable popular culture and what then comes after it.

Ed Ayers: Is there anything about our current moment and then just thinking forward about the echoes of minstrelsy in today’s culture that can somehow challenge the profitability of certain kinds of stereotype or assumptions about black people and their culture and their modes of living?

Eric Lott: A few years ago, I thought that there was a moment of Beyonce at the Superbowl in New Orleans in her halftime show, which was a kind of Charlie’s Angels riff, and there were at least a dozen black female performers surrounding Beyonce on the stage in the New Orleans Super Dome, taking it back as it were from George Bush’s Katrina disaster.

Ed Ayers: Interesting.

Eric Lott: To have this Charlie’s Angels theme, the reuniting of Destiny’s Child on stage under the guise, very lightly staged, of a crime-fighting troop of black women surrounded by black women playing instruments and dancing with martial steps, that struck me as a thrilling performative analog to some new dispensation. In other words, it staged the struggle that must continue and that has to go on, because I don’t think, once one finds the right moves, you can count on them staying forever.

Ed Ayers: Eric Lott is a professor of English and American studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His latest book is called Black Mirror, The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism.

Corks & Curls

When the news of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s yearbook page broke early February, people began diving into old college yearbooks to uncover what kind of racist imagery may be lurking inside. Historian Kirt von Daacke was one step ahead of them. For months, he’s led research into the University of Virginia’s yearbook “Corks & Curls” to locate and contextualize examples of blackface and other white supremacist imagery. Brian talks with von Daacke about what his team has found so far, and what their findings reveal about the presence of racist rhetoric throughout UVA’s history.

Music:

Rain Stops Play by Ketsa

Ralph Northam; University of Virginia; blackface; white supremacy; yearbooks

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Kirt von Daacke: The later pictures are much more shocking when you come across them, but the earlier books are … it’s … They’re sickening to go page by page and have that material wash over you.

Brian Balogh: This is Kirt von Daacke. He’s a history professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Kirt von Daacke: I am the co-chair of both the President’s Commission on Slavery in the University and the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation.

Brian Balogh: For six years, von Daacke has helped lead research on UVA’s disturbing history with slavery. More recently, his team extended its timeline into the 20th Century with the focus on a specific part of the university’s past.

Kirt von Daacke: When the new commission hired a program officer, the first task I put her on was going to the yearbook. This was in November, so she began working on the yearbook’s page by page, year by year, and I was collecting the university magazines and alumni news and bulletins, so we had been on this project for about two and a half months when the Governor Northam scandal brought everyone’s attention to what might be lurking in the yearbooks.

Brian Balogh: I talked with von Daacke about blackface and white supremacist imagery in UVA yearbooks and what he’s seen at other schools.

Kirt von Daacke: In December, to get a sense of was what we were seeing in the UVA yearbooks normal, I began looking at yearbooks from the 1880s on at other Virginia schools, and, unsurprisingly, the material that’s so prevalent in the UVA yearbook appears in other yearbooks. There’s a lot more of it in the UVA yearbook and a lot more of it in UVA student publications where they’re talking about blackface minstrelsy. They’re drawing cartoons and they’re really personalizing it in a way. It’s got a very local and particular quality to them. They’re talking about Charlottesville people and development in Charlottesville in a way that I didn’t see in other yearbooks in the state.

Brian Balogh: How do you explain the difference?

Kirt von Daacke: The university, by 1860s, in many ways it’s an incubator for post-slavery thought, and with that comes a dedication to white supremacy. We shouldn’t be surprised that in 1865, when former Confederate students returned to the university that they picked up right where they left off, and you see this pretty clearly in the student publications as soon as they returned the publication about 1868 that they are talking about racial hierarchy. They’re talking about white rule and, by the 1880s, this is … It feels like an all-encompassing passion of students and the community locally.

Brian Balogh: What about when you go beyond the formerly Confederate states? Have you looked at it in yearbooks in the north or in the west?

Kirt von Daacke: Yes, so I’ve looked mostly at some yearbooks in the northeast just to get a sense. It appears there as well, again, nothing like what you find at southern schools or at Virginia, and it tends not to appear at many schools until about 1915, that seems to be. I don’t know if this is the case, but my gut instinct tells me that’s something to do with Birth of a Nation and Wilson’s screening of that in the White House that really brings this to the forefront of the national conversation.

Brian Balogh: Corks and Curls, the name of the yearbook. What does that mean?

Kirt von Daacke: The first meaning is speaking to local student parlance for how students perform in class. Corking is in the description. It’s the corked bottle. When you’re called on, cold called in class and don’t know the answer or give the wrong answer, you have corked. When you amazingly know the amazingly know the correct answer and expound upon your knowledge, that’s curling, but in 1888, when they formed the yearbook, there’s a double entendre very clearly lurking there.

Brian Balogh: The other interpretation of a cork and a curl?

Kirt von Daacke: Is referenced to the burnt cork used in blackface minstrel performance and, curls, to the wigs they would have worn in performing, and so I think, for students in 1888, corks and curls speaks to both the history about classroom performance and to what’s really common at UVA at the time. In 1888, the university has a minstrel troupe. The glee club performs in blackface, and the yearbooks that include other theatrical groups and music groups all used blackface imagery in their yearbook pages.

Brian Balogh: We know as historians that, by the 1920s, Virginia, as is the case for all the other southern states, has embraced Jim Crow Segregation. Do you think it’s changed in the yearbook as a result of that?

Kirt von Daacke: Oh, no. The teens and ’20s are the high watermark of the appearance of this material, I think, again, unsurprisingly, given the both statewide and national context. I think the high watermark is … I think it’s 1916, and it’s 35 separate images in a single yearbook, so this is an order of magnitude more than you see in most other yearbooks. It’s pretty disturbing.

Brian Balogh: I’m drowning here, Kirt. How far do we need to advance the tape to get a glimmer of change?

Kirt von Daacke: There are references to student activism in the ’30s that suggest there are people pushing back against the dominant narrative, and it’s pretty clear by the early 1950s that this is now a theme. The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper, starting in the early 1950s begins to call out in particular fraternities for racism and sexism, and so you can hear an alternative narrative emerging pretty clearly in the ’50s. In 1970, I’m struck by how prescient this is in a way. The Cavalier Daily publishes in October an editorial entitled Racist Attitudes, and it’s about the deployment of the Confederate flag at student events, and so I think it’s very clear between ’52 or ’53 and 1970 that there are different narratives emerging.

Brian Balogh: What about the frequency of blackface in the yearbook itself? I gathered that are more images beginning in the ’50s and the ’60s.

Kirt von Daacke: There are, in general, that very specific blackface performance that we associate with blackface minstrelsy. It really seems to fade away in the 1930s, but the difficult imagery does not go away, and there’s some really troubling imagery that reappears in the 1970s in the yearbook in particular, so early 1970s.

Brian Balogh: Could you describe what you found?

Kirt von Daacke: It’s the 1971 yearbook, so this is the 1970-1971 academic year. The most disturbing image is easily one fraternity’s two-page spread, and at that point in the yearbooks, fraternities typically get two pages. One is a composite or a group photo and then some photos of some of their activities and a list of names. This fraternity’s image is a two-page spread. One page is a staged lynching with people in black. They look to me a lot like Klan robes, but they’re black.

Brian Balogh: They’re wearing pointed hat as I recall.

Kirt von Daacke: Yes, they are. Again, it’s hard to tell because there’s no context provided, but they sure look like black Klan robes to me. I think that’s what they’re meant to evoke, and they’re standing in a forest clearing. There’s a rope running along the ground through them. Several of them are brandishing rifles, and then above them hanging in a tree is a white person in a white robe who looks like they’ve been done up in blackface minstrel makeup and is hanging from a tree, and the other pages is all black with, in white, a quote from a Frank Zappa song that to paraphrase is, “I don’t know what it’s like to be black in this country, but sometimes I wish I weren’t white,” and that’s the entire spread.

Brian Balogh: How do you interpret that quotation?

Kirt von Daacke: The song interestingly is from 1966, and it’s a song in sympathy with the Watts rebellion that also includes the line, “They just want to do you in because of the color of your skin,” so, again, hard to tell, we don’t know because they don’t provide any other context to those, but I think they’re lynching Frank Zappa that it’s a white man with curly hair and facial hair, and that’s who they’re actually lynching, so this is in resistance to Civil Rights and anyone who is in sympathy with the African-American demand for equality in this country.

Kirt von Daacke: Your blood runs cold when you see it. It’s really hard to imagine how anyone in 1971 could think that image was appropriate. It’s just shocking, but not surprising. There are at least three staged lynchings that appear in UVA yearbooks dating back to 1914 … excuse me … in UVA publications.

Brian Balogh: The controversy over Virginia’s governor and attorney general in relationship to blackface stems back to the 1980s. Are you still finding blackface images in the UVA yearbook in the 1980s?

Kirt von Daacke: You see culturally inappropriate images. You see skin darkening at themed costume parties. I don’t know if they’re Polynesian or Hawaiian parties, but you see men in grass skirts who’ve tanned their skin. You see there’s a Beaux-Arts Ball that goes on. It seems to be every year, and, one year, the theme is … I think this is ’81 … is an Egyptian theme, and there’s a picture of someone who looks like they’re dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, and they’ve tanned their skin for the image, but you don’t see those very explicit blackface images in yearbooks.

Kirt von Daacke: I don’t think this means it goes away. The change in the 1970s is the school becomes coeducational in 1970, and as women assume leadership roles, including at the yearbook, the look and feel of the yearbook changes rather dramatically in the ’70s.

Brian Balogh: You’re speculating that the yearbook itself began to exercise some editorial control over the content?

Kirt von Daacke: Yes. The speculation for this comes about that that ’71 image is at a very particular moment in UVA’s history. That’s the first year of undergraduate coeducation at UVA. It’s also at that point, in a short and not very robust integration effort, the largest incoming African-American class in UVA’s history at that point. I find it not surprising given the history of the yearbook and the culture at UVA that there’s clear resistance to both of those changes amongst the white male student body.

Brian Balogh: Surely, coeducation didn’t come out of nowhere, so what kind of images in the yearbook regarding gender have you found in your survey?

Kirt von Daacke: This stretches well into the 1980s and beyond. There are often inappropriate pictures of students, men and women, at parties where clearly drinking has been involved, and there are men reaching up skirts. There are women who passed out.

Brian Balogh: In the yearbook?

Kirt von Daacke: Yes.

Brian Balogh: I have to confess. I’m not an expert at yearbooks.

Kirt von Daacke: No.

Brian Balogh: I’m not sure that I’ve looked at my own more than twice in my life. What’s the section that that is in?

Kirt von Daacke: It varies. That’s what’s interesting. Whenever there are pictures of social events, whether they are fraternity parties or organizational parties, you see these pictures. You see them, and they’re often taken not at the university, but at other local venues, and so they just appear as part of the wallpaper of student social life at the university, but they also appear in staged images.

Kirt von Daacke: In that 1971 yearbook, there’s also a fraternity picture that we had to really look closely to figure out what was going on. It’s a group of the men in the fraternities all standing and sitting in a room somewhere, and they have a white material around their mouths. We thought it might be blackface, but then we realized there was no other … None of the other context clues about blackface were there and no one had darkened their skin, and then we zoomed in and then we realized it was either … It must be whipped cream around their mouths, and we kept looking at the image, and they appear to be standing around a table in the middle of the room that has a huge pile of whipped cream on it. It still didn’t make sense, and then we zoomed in, and it appears to be a naked woman covered from the neck to her ankles in whipped cream …

Brian Balogh: Oh, my God.

Kirt von Daacke: … and so they … and this is part of that weird moment in ’70, ’71 where white male students, some of them are deeply resistant to coeducation, and then you have, combined with that, these images that are deeply resistant to integration as well.

Brian Balogh: Do you look at current yearbooks?

Kirt von Daacke: We’ve looked at yearbooks all the way to the last few years, and I love that you mentioned your own yearbooks. I went and dug my high school yearbooks out and didn’t find anything. I think there’s some questionable costume choices here and there, but no blackface imagery. I’ve seen yearbooks in Colorado in the ’80s that involve the use of the Klan hoods as part of a student pep squad, so this is not a story confined to UVA or confined to Charlottesvile.

Brian Balogh: Kirt von Daacke is a professor of history and assistant dean in the college of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, Ed, I was really struck by that polling data we referred to earlier in the show. About a third of Americans thinks it’s always or at least sometimes acceptable for a white person to wear blackface on Halloween, and so when I look at people who are okay with dressing up in blackface on Halloween, it seems like they’re viewing it as though it’s any other costume, and I hate to play the history card here, but it seems like what they’re missing is the very deep historical connection of the meaning of blackface over time.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, but I think they may actually have a historical understanding that it’s been widespread in the past, so what’s wrong with it now? Everybody knows about Al Jolson. You’ve seen that picture, right? I mean, Amos ‘n’ Andy was one of the most popular shows on early American television, so it’s not like it was underground or something.

Ed Ayers: Eric Lott, with whom we spoke earlier, his book on blackface is called Love and Theft, and I think he got something important there, which is that a lot of the white people who dress up this way, whether it’s as the William sisters or Kurtis Blow or Michael Jackson, claim they’re doing it out of respect and affection for those people, so I think their confusions are multiple, Brian, is that they don’t really have any sense of how this has been associated in the past with really corrosive racism and they also don’t understand how their own actions are anything other than good-natured adoption of the persona people they claim to admire.

Nathan Connoll: I mean, the moment is one where we’re kind of figuring out what the new standard is around this blackface symbolism, so I was really surprised when USA Today ran a major spread in the wake of the media news around Northam where they looked at 900 different yearbooks around the country and they found, obviously, rife with examples of blackface and Klan iconography and reenacted lynchings. It ran the whole gamut of things that were seemingly benign blackface performances to over-reenactments of racial terrorism.

Nathan Connoll: There were several things that were striking about this. One was the way in which so many of the folks who had performed in these various costume moments were lawyers and doctors, and they occupied every rung of society. The study looked at any manner of universities, from community colleges to libera arts schools in the northeast to southern state schools and the like, and what was a wild footnote of the story itself, the spread, was that the editor-in-chief of USA Today found that she, too, had published these photos as a college student in a yearbook that she was editing many years ago as an undergraduate, and so it led to this extraordinary soul-searching moment about just how nested the history of blackface imagery was in the 1980s and how she didn’t even recall publishing these images, but it felt like she had been really shamed by the reality of her linked to this past.

Nathan Connoll: It’s just one of these moments where folks who are living through the ’80s and ’90s who are donning blackface are at that time not seeing it as out of bounds, and, yet, here we are only 20 or 30 years removed, and now that in itself is seemingly grounds for dismissal from any number of respectable pose, and so I guess this reminds me in some ways of a conversation we had, it feels like ages ago, around Confederate monuments, which is to say is there a point at which you’re supposed to go back and reinterpret the meaning of these older symbols for a new time?

Ed Ayers: Yeah, and what I would wonder is how much we’ve changed since the ’80s or ’90s. I think you’re right, Nathan, it seems like a long time ago that we were talking about these Confederate memorials and, yet, that had been triggered by an event or two. We think of the Dylann Roof shooting in the summer of 2015, and so it’s like these combustible materials that are laying all around us. Sometimes they combust and sometimes they don’t, and you can’t tell what’s going to be the spark for it all, but I think those of us in higher education know that, every year, it seems that there are white fraternity boys by and large caught on camera in blackface and are shocked. They proclaim to understand that this is offensive. How can the message simply not get out?

Nathan Connoll: There is something about the carnivalesque around Halloween. What is it about black people that make them suitable subjects for costumes? This is where I think the Eric Lott discussion is really useful, because there are very specific kinds of blackface performance. If you think back to the way the minstrel figure was really grammatically the same in terms of their inability to form proper sentences, always smiling, there was a certain template that’s there.

Nathan Connoll: People are not dressing up on how Halloween like Colin Powell. They’re not dressing up on Halloween like a figure that could be regarded as a black CEO or, in some cases, not even like, say, Oprah Winfrey, unless they want to make other kinds of satire a part of that performance. It’s about people who are athletes or particular kinds of entertainers particularly around urban black culture. I mean, that I think is where it’s important to at least get underneath the seemingly harmless performances, which is to say what is it about becoming a basketball player in a “ghetto” outfit that would seemingly be okay as a form of performance? That wouldn’t be the case if you were trying to appropriate some other form of black life or culture.

Brian Balogh: I’ll just ask a question. I’m wondering whether either of you has any direct personal experience with blackface.

Ed Ayers: I grew up in the segregated south and went to an all-white school and, in second grade, I was selected with another boy to be put in blackface for a school program with the sixth grade glee club singing spirituals, and I was up there with a white cardboard top hat and a tambourine in pitch black paint on my face. This is 1960, and the fact that this is the same year as the sit-ins and long after Montgomery, and I have often marveled that it was seen as an event of great hilarity by my friends and even by my family, who thought it was fine for me to be up there.

Ed Ayers: I don’t know really what to do with that except to remind us that … how white people can just not be paying attention, or maybe they are paying attention, and this blackface is not just absence, maybe it’s not just innocence, but maybe it is a form of aggression in and of itself. I’m not sure what a second grade boy is doing, but the fact that they would use those as props and thinking that it was fun to do that I think just tells you about something malignant in that culture at that time.

Nathan Connoll: Yeah. I mean, that’s a hell of a story, and I think it actually really crystallizes just the way that you contextualized it. It crystallizes the point, which is that minstrelsy is meant to take the place of politics. All of these periods we’re talking, I mean, the 1830s when minstrelsy is emerging, it’s a time when there’s still a free black population that’s demanding a certain kind of citizenship. Certainly, at the end of the 19th Century, there’s all kinds of reasons to want to make sure that blackface is a dominant form of political performance, or apolitical performance rather, because of the way the disenfranchisement is everywhere for African-Americans.

Nathan Connoll: I could see quite easily why something like the 1980s would be a point where blackface imagery is everywhere because you have a post-Civil Rights moment where people are trying to figure out whether or not things like Affirmative Action should still be in place. I mean, universities, that’s not an incidental location I don’t think in that way, and now, obviously, the question of blackface comes up precisely because we’ve had a new political breakthrough with Obama and other black officials rising to new heights, and I wonder if people are saying, “You know what? You can’t put the political genie back in the bottle,” and so out with any number of old ways of dampening the political conversation around what black folk can do and achieve.

Brian Balogh: Ironically, in this particular instance in Virginia it’s come up through history, through these old yearbooks, and to give the public officials the benefit of the doubt in terms of what they’re saying today, they’re deeply embarrassed and deeply regret having participated in this.

Nathan Connoll: That the fallout is potential political is also not an accident, right? It’s not about whether or not someone can issue an apology, but the demand for one’s resignation from public office I think really just sharpens the political content of what blackface has always been about.

Ed Ayers: When the demand comes from fellow party members who are worried about the fallout for the party as a whole rather than the individual who’s been caught in blackface is another interesting dynamic of this that … and once you’ve let that genie out of the bottle, the Democratic senators of Virginia can’t put it back in either. The efforts of people of goodwill, white people of goodwill to show their solidarity is entangling them in lots of different ways they could not have anticipated.

Brian Balogh: One does wonder if this dilemma for white people of goodwill lets some white people of not such goodwill off the hook. We know that we’re living in an era of rising white nationalism, of all kinds of public symbols around that white nationalism, and in an era of explicit appeals to white nationalist and white supremacist thought, and I do think that very dilemma that both of you referred to for white people of goodwill really makes it all the more difficult to address perhaps people who don’t have such goodwill on the racial front.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, and the ironies compound, Brian. The same medical school that produced the annual in which Governor Northam appeared has been singled out for its recent gains in diversity and a culture of acceptance and promoting African-American doctors, so who knows where this is all going to lead. If there is one thing in American history that seems to have no limitations of complexity, it’s this.

Brian Balogh: That’s it for us this week, but you can keep your conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virgnia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, @backstoryradio.

Brian Balogh: Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connoll: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nathan Connoll: Any news, finding, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 2: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is a Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.

Speaker 2: BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.