Corks & Curls

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.