The Malevolence Of Minstrelsy

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.