Blackface Minstrelsy

I. General Overview

Minstrelsy was a form of popular theatre like melodrama that spread in the 19th century, appealing especially to lower class and working class audiencces, but crossing over in a variety of ways to appeal to middle class audiences. It was one of the first major forms of popular theatre to the develop in the United States, where it contributed significantly to the development of most modern forms of American entertainment including circus, vaudeville, musical theatre, standup comedy and early television and film. The music of minstrel shows influenced jazz, ragtime, musical show tunes and other forms of American popular music. In short, there’s hardly a genre of American pop culture that can’t trace some part of its development to minstrelsy. For this reason alone, its an important thing for any American theatre artist to know about.

At the same time, minstrelsy has played an extremely ambivalent role in African-American history. The stories and their characters depend on racial stereotypes of African Americans that from a contemporary perspective are blatantly racist. At the time, the characters were understood to represent an “Ethiopian delineation” that occupiied a low position within pseudo-scientific taxonomies of race.

Blackface performers would add water to burnt cork to make a pitch-black paste, use red lipstick to make the performers lips seem thick and wear white gloves to provide stark contrast to the dark face so that every character became a kind of racial grotesque. On the other hand, some scholars have argued that blackface minstrelsy became popular in working class communities in the 1840s where aspects of African-American identity were taken on as a medium for expressing dissent and class consciousness. From this perspective, minstrelsy might be likened to the radical meaning ascribed to rap music and other aspects of contemporary African American culture which is adapted by other identity groups. Although some of these same critics argue that whatever radical character minstrelsy had was co-opted in the 1850s. As we’ll discuss on Wednesday, adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin into melodrama and minstrelsy in the 1850s and 1860s made blackface more genteel at the same time as it addressed the controversies of slavery. The fact that by the 1870s, there were many minstrel troupes comprised of African-American performers complicates the issue further. The history of African-American performance passes directly through blackface minstrelsy.

II. Origins and development

Although there are a variety of more disperse sources for blackface minstrelsy, the practice emerged clearly in 1824 when an Englishman, Charles Matthews, created a sensation in London by performing caricatures of black people he claimed to have seen in the United States. He performed a character named Agamemnon, who was a fat runaway slave fiddler, and a pretentious black actor performing Hamlet (a caricature of the great African-American actor, Ira Aldridge, who was performing Shakespearean roles in Europe at the same time).

Indeed, minstrelsy seems to offer a catalogue of racial types against which African-Americans have struggled for the past century. Let’s consider a few that remained in the repertoire:

George Washington Dixon developed blackface minstrel performances in the working class Five Points district of lower Manhattan. (If you’ve seen Gangs of New York, you have a fairly vivid impression of what this was like). Dixon’s performances were raucous compared to those of Matthews and TD Rice. He invented the character Zip Coon, the uppity Northern dandy, overdressed and ambitious, caricaturing free blacks in the northeast.

Jim Crow, the joyful Southern slave, was the character originated by Thomas Dartmouth Rice in 1830, which gave birth to minstrelsy in the United States. Jim Crow was a kind of anarchic black harlequin who sang and danced a jig. Black drumming infected him with rhythm, making him wheel around, sing and clap.

In the 1840s, the popularity of performers like Dixon and Rice gave way to traveling minstrel troupes consisting of 4 to 6 performers. The programs became more standardized, and by the 1850s had a regular structure of three parts. The first introduced the whole company with music and comedy acts and closed with a big chorus number. There would be a semi-circle of musicians with the end men on one side (Mr. Bones playing bones and Mr. Tambo tambourine) mocking the dignified emcee, or Mr. Interlocutor on the other side. (Spike Lee recreates this kind of an opening part in the section of Bamboozled we’ll watch).

Then there would be an intermission, followed by the olio, a series of specialized individual variety routines like skits, dances, stump speeches (mocking contemporary politicians), or sentimental songs (like those of Stephen Foster). The olio would eventually develop into vaudeville.

The last part was the closest to an actual play, consisting basically of a one-act farce. Sometimes a parody of a serious play, it was usually a sketch set in a center of African-American life (usually a Southern plantation or a northern city), mixing dialogue and slapstick comedy with music and dance—like a miniature musical comedy.

III. Other stock characters

The Coon is “the stupid, malapropism-spouting, grinning, dancing, cowardly character who appeals to white audiences for mere entertainment value. He is the no-account, unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creature, good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting craps or butchering the English language.” (Dicker/sun 22) (See Spike Lee clip).

A variant is the picaninny, a harmless little screwball whose eyes pop and hair stands on end at the slightest provocation (Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

The tragic mulatta is of mixed blood, irrevocably stained by (as little as) one drop of Negro blood (like Boucicault’s The Octoroon who is one eighth black). Her white blood makes her self-sacrificing and sympathetic, and she’s always trying to pass as white.

The Mammy “is big, fat, dark, cantankerous, fiercely independent, and asexual. She can also be generally sweet, joplly, good-tempered, and completely dedicated to her white family, especially to the children.” (eg. Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Aunt Jemima)


VI. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled!

One of the most perplexing aspects of blackface minstrelsy is that in the 1870s, it started to attract a growing number of African-American performers. Before the Civil War, black performers were prohibited from appearing in Minstrel Shows. But by the early 20th century, some of the mst famous minstrels were black. For example, Bert Williams was an African-American who performed in blackface, was part of the famous Williams and Walker vaudeville team, joined Ziegfield’s Follies in 1910, and continued performing into the 1930s. In some situations, African-American minstrels would parody white minstrels, but in most cases they added a paradoxical “authenticity” to the racial stereotypes.

In Bamboozled!, Spike Lee takes a controversial look at how African-American culture can be complicit in perpetuating the kind of racial stereotypes of minstrel shows. The basic premise of the movie is that an African-American TV producer ironically creates a contemporary minstrel show for television. To his horror, it is wildly successful, suggesting that contemporary audiences are not nearly so enlightened about race as they think they are.