Eric Lott
Professor of English
University of Virginia
"Blackface Minstrelsy: Past and Present"
February 20, 2003

Eric Lott: There were two ways of looking at it. Two scholarly ways of approaching the minstrel tradition. One which lasted all the way up until the 1960s was basically nostalgic pining for the good old days when white men would put on black face makeup and make fun of black people on the popular stage in cities and in rural areas throughout the country, not just in the south. In New York as much as…if not more than Richmond or some other place.

And it is shocking really that this tradition of nostalgia for the good old minstrel show. Mark Twain of all people in 1905 in his autobiography says, "The good old nigger show." If you have the good old nigger show back, I would never go see opera again." There is a nostalgia for the minstrel show…the black face minstrel show that extends all the way out until the 1960s. And only at that point in about the mid-1960s with the Civil Rights Movement does another tradition…the second tradition of critical thought about minstrelsy begin to crop up. And that is the hey wait a minute, this is a really racist form of caricature and popular entertainment. It was wildly popular in the middle of the 19th century. Obviously there were no movies. You went out to the theatre and half of the time…much of the time what you when you went to the theatre was five white guys dressed up in what they supposed to be slave clothes or other kinds of black clothing, blackface makeup, putting on the ways…the jokes, the dances, the singing, the malapropisms, the verbal impediments of what they thought black people were characterized by in the 19th century. People like Amiri Baraka in the 1960s…other critics, come along and say this is a corrupt tradition and they helped establish a tradition of scholarship and thought about minstrelsy which basically equates minstrelsy with racism. You see someone in blackface, you don’t hear about a racist performance.

This is obviously crucial and way over due to come in the 1960s. But fortunately it is now on the table and it is solidified in our heads at least some of our heads. The big book to put this point of view on table and offer a history of the minstrel show, in case you are interested, a history of the minstrel show that still stands up…it is really nice in it’s coverage of the minstrel show from the beginning of it’s run to the end in the late 19th century and early 20th century is a book by Robert Toll. And the book is called Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in American Culture. It is comprehensive. It is not that long. It is anti-racist in spirit and in letter. And it is an important milestone…it only came out in 1974…about twenty-five years ago…almost thirty now I guess…And the studies that followed in it’s wake or they were minor, couldn’t get over the fact…the idea…the now established fact that minstrel show was a racist phenomenon.

So when I came to the subject, you know, you had all these people longing for the good old days…white people longing for the good old days…it was always white people. I don’t know a black person in print, on record who pined for the good old days of the minstrel show. In fact, all the way back in 1849 in the North Star, Frederick Douglas…I will read you the quote…said this about minstrelsy, "Blackface imitators were the filthy the scum of white society who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature in which to make money and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens." That was in 1848, not 1849. Sorry.

So all the way from the beginning there is almost without compromise a tradition of black commentary on the minstrel show that is overwhelmingly negative. This is only picked up, as I say, in the sixties by certain scholars who denounce it as a racist form.
I come to it and I see two kinds of different impulses going on. One clearly racist impulse by which white people in a popular entertainment form make fun of people they deem inferior and enjoy feeling superior to. But isn’t it an odd form in which people will do this…white people will do this…by dressing up and acting like…acting black…actually trying to inhabit the bodies of black people. Now, to do this as Ralph Ellison recognized in an essay of his in the 1950s, to do this you have to pay attention to black people as well as being interested in making fun of them. So here as in other instances that you find racism itself is kind of a complicated affair, right, because it involves all this kind of fascination and wild, often creative imagination about what black people are, who black people are, what they are like, in order to denounce and make fun of them. And make them look inferior and foolish.

So I was interested in that imaginative investment on the part of whites. The question being why are white people so fascinated with black people and why do they act out this fascination in such crazy, and curious ways. A little cliché that now hip-hop is as popular in the white suburbs as it is among black audiences everywhere…black suburbs and cities. There is only one instance of white fascination with black people and black culture. If you will, Elvis…Eminem goes around comparing himself to Elvis in that song, title of which I now forget. Elvis is another instance, you know, thirty or forty years earlier of white interest and fascination with black American culture and attempt…sometimes unconscious, often conscious to rip it off and make money off of black influences and black sources.

The minstrel show in the middle of the 19th century, the 1840s in particular, is…the minstrel show is the Eminem of the 19th century. We are talking about a form that evinces as much interest in black culture…interest in performing it, playing it, trying to be it, as much as ridicule it or make fun of it. And again, wildly popular with mostly…overwhelmingly white audiences. But not exclusively white audiences.

So my take, it never loses sight of the racism of the form but it just wants to investigate the complications of this racism in which white people are called out, often with their pants down…sometimes literally in fact, you know, up to their necks of these wild imaginings of who are fellows…these black people in the United States…who they are, who they might be. As it turns out, it is only one manifestation…the minstrel show…of the whole slavery crisis, which starts to boil up in the 1840s. Comes to a head all across the 1850s. And finally eventuates in the Civil War in 1861.

So not only do you have in itself this complicated, little entertainment form that on a slightly bigger canvas is a really, really popular entertainment form in the middle of the 19th century. You have something that gets caught up in all the grand political issues of the day. You know, are black people human, are they not human. Will we persist with slavery, or not. Can the country be half slave and half free. Should the north, as Gaylord Harrison argued, simply secede from the south, forget the south. If they want to have slaves, forget it, we won’t compromise with slaveholders. We will have a nation to ourselves in the north.

The minstrel show gets caught up in all of these issues, which makes it a very interesting form historically speaking. What was it…it was basically in the 1830s when it begins, 1840s, 1850s, an all white form that almost always was done in the following configuration. Five white men on stage in blackface makeup and "black dress", with banjos, fiddles, tambourine, and an instrument called the bones which were two…supposed to be two rib bones clacked together like castanets. These came to be manufactured out of different kinds of material…wood and other things.

These five performers, sometimes four performers would play these instruments and sing in the manner that they associated with black people they had seen…usually not on the plantation. As I say, it is not a southern form. But out on the waterfront, in New York City, for example…the music sounded like this. [music playing]

It sounds like Irish, British Isles folk music, right…jig type stuff. In fact, this is one of it’s chief sources…this music. How did it end up seeming black? It plays to anybody in the 19th century. That music right there. And it is as good as James Brown in the 20th century. That is black music. Play that to anybody in the 19th century, that is black music.

Well how did this come to be? It came to be because the popular music vernacular sort of handed down…sit around at home playing your musical instruments kind of music in the United States…the most popular music was brought over rather directly from the British Isles by immigrants from those parts. Increasingly as the 19th century goes forward, these are Irish people…Irish men who bring over songs from their native countries and are adopted by slaves on the plantation…black people in the north and melded with various kinds of African percussive elements. There is a great syncretism that goes on which does involve a heavy overlay of music from the British Isles with rhythmical elements that are contributed by…it is a very complicated subject how this mix comes into being…but shorthand, this is close enough. Rhythmic and you know percussive elements are co-joined with that music from the British Isles to form what became you know the music of the slaves, the popular music of the slaves. You know, to the sounds of which they would hold plantation frolics or in the north, on the waterfront, in the markets on the lower East Side in New York City, you would find fiddle players…black fiddle players and banjo players. The banjo an African instrument originally, playing for black dancers who would be restricted to a shingle on the waterfront because their masters before slavery was ended in the north, and finally in 1827 in New York, thought that they would get a little too chipper with the dance steps and dance right the hell away. So they were confined to a little board. I will read you a description of the way this worked. One white butcher describes these dance practices really nicely and is quite evocative of the way this stuff must have looked. Public Negro dancing is what he is talking about in a market right on the waterfront of the East River in lower New York. Negroes who visited here were principally slaves from Long Island who had leave from their masters for certain holidays. Slightly different from what I just suggested. Among which Pinkster was principal one. You may know about Pinkster from African American studies. Then as they usually had three days holiday they were ever ready by their Negro sayings or doings to make a few shillings more. So they would be hired by some joking butcher or individual to engage in a jig or break down as that was one of the pastimes at home on the barn floor or in a frolic. And those that could would dance soon raised a collection. But some of them did more in turning around and showing off from the designated spot and keeping to the regular shakedown, which caused them all to be confined to a board or a shingle as they called it and not allowed off it. At this they must show their skill and being several together in parties, each had his particular shingle brought with him as part of his stock and trade. This board was usually about five to six feet long of large width with it’s particular spring in it. And to keep it in it’s place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. One person. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the nose of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the East Side of the fish market in front of Bruno Browns Ship Chandlery, which is in the location I just mentioned.

A couple of things that are really interesting about that passage. One is that the slaves are coming in on holiday and dancing for public consumption to raise a little extra money. So already you have simply because of the conditions in which characterize the master-slave relationship, black culture being circulated as a commodified thing…being sold for cold, hard cash. The other thing is that while the masters would allow a certain amount of freedom for these performances to go on, the slaves in question knew what freedom actually looked like. And infused these arts with a sense of skipping off and maybe taking liberties…even the great liberty of running away…if that was at all possible. There was a resistance force inside these arts that you hear in many African American, if not all African American performance cultures down to this day.

In any case, that is the stuff that white people for example, hearing and seeing these dancers in New York perform, identified as really rousing, really excellent African American stuff. They copied it. They took it to the stage. And made lots and lots of money on the New York stage.

In 1854, I read someplace there were no less than twelve black face troops performing on a single night in New York City. All of them were packed to the rafters in the theatres they performed in. I am talking about white people making a whole lot of money out of black artistic material.

But here is the funny thing. If you are a working class white man and you are going to see these minstrel shows in the 19th century, in New York City, for example, you go to the theatre…you know, you aren’t enslaved but you aren’t making a hell of a lot of bread and your working conditions are in fact getting worse and worse over time as certain developments in the early capitalist culture of the United States move forward, mainly where you used to…I mean this is just to again put a kind of short hand on a complicated process…if you are a cobbler. You used to make the entire shoe. Right, as a white working class man. You used to get the leather, sew it together, nail the heel on, style it, model it in certain ways, and then indeed sell it. Essentially the forward march of capitalism in the 19th century works like this. That labor gets segmented into smaller and smaller increments. Workers themselves get to do less and less interesting jobs so that where maybe as a cobbler you used to make the entire shoe, now you get an almost put together shoe and your job is simply to nail the heel on. And you pass it on to the next person. And then it goes to the front where a clerk…this new category of middle class person will actually sell the shoe. You used to have your own shop. But now you are restricted to the back as some kind of worker in the shadows. See the early hints of sweatshop work taking place under these conditions.

So work is no longer satisfying. You don’t have your hand in the entire process. It is compartmentalized. It is fragmented. And you are getting rather upset about it because not only are you having less and less interesting work, you are getting paid less for it as time goes on.

The worse you feel about the decline in your job conditions, the more inclined you are, I found anyway, to go to the theatre and make fun of black people because however low you are in the social scale, at least you are not black. That is one major bit of social logic behind the minstrel show and why it was popular with chiefly working class audiences until later decades in the 19th century. No matter how low you go, no matter how Irish you are, no matter how few days you have been in this country, right…as many writers…most recently Toni Morrison have said, the first word you learned when you get off the boat is nigger because that is what will separate you from this other class of persons that you can always feel better than. Dubois in his work, Black Reconstruction, called this the psychological wage of being white. That workers, to his chagrin, he lamented…white workers would always settle for that psychological wage rather than bonding according to class across racial lines and going after the real enemy, Dubois thought, the capitalists who owned all the money…who owned all the property who could tell everybody what to do. Rather than doing this cross class alliance that would actually make conditions better under a capitalist society, white workers always settled for feeling white. They took that compensation out of a situation in which they could simply feel that tiny bit of superiority vis a vis black people and felt satisfied with that. That is one source of divisions within labor groups, unions, many different kinds of social groupings and collectives in the United States to this day.

Every now and then, interestingly enough, white workers though would come up with this slogan…they would return to this slogan, which somebody had thought of in the 1830s…the slogan of wage slavery. I am simply a wage slave. Sometimes it is used in a really reactionary way. It is like, yeah you are a slave in the south, but I don’t care about these slaves in the south because I am a slave too. I am just nailing the heel on this shoe now. You know, for pennies a day and I am as much a slave as they are. So who cares about you?
Other times the rhetoric of wage slavery could be used in very progressive ways. Yeah, we are slaves. We are becoming slaves just like the slaves in the south. We have an alliance here and under the idea…under the banner of wage slavery, could fight against, as an implied organization, fight against the lords of the loom in the north, so called…big textile giants…and the lords of the lash in the south. There is an implicit connection there. And I think here and there in the minstrel show you do see connections made between white workers and black slaves that point in different direction. This suggests the underlying fascination that I also see in the minstrel show.
For the most part and most of the time we are talking about unrelieved racist caricature of the sort that I will play out of this little dialogue. One thing that would happen all the time aside from music and the dancing is these little dialogues, these mock dialogues that would go on in which the following kinds of caricature would occur.

[X: Mr. Johnson did you ever know that I been through college.

Y: Oh yes Julius and I knows how you got through.

X: How was Johnson?

Y: While I throw the chimney to be so.

X: No. No. I don’t mean that way Mr. Johnson. I mean to say that I liked a good deal. Besides I got my pluma.

Y: What you get a pluma for, Julius?

X: Why, that expresses as much as I am fully competent for an office and bears examination.

Y: Brother Julius, I don’t think you will bear examination. Therefores I’s going to aks you some questions. Now, how was this country bounded?

X: Well Mr. Johnson, according to my calculations it is bounded on the north by Niagra mountains. On the south by the Pencil Took River. One the East by the sunrise and on the west by large quantities of swine.

Y: Julius, that em all perfectly correct. Now, does you know anything about grammar?

X: Oh yes. Alrighty gramma.

Y: Well Julius, how many parts end of to the grammar?

X: Three parts Mr. Johnson.

Y: Well Julius, what does they consist of?

X: Etymology, swintax, and mahogany.

Y: Golly. Julius, I must say that you em titled to the highest stinction in the colored society.]

EL: The brothers are stupid. They don’t know how to use the language. They are child like. They are just not in control of conceptual apparatus that defines you as a citizen of the United States. Right. This obviously makes white people feel really good…to feel like they are privileged…even more privileged than they might otherwise have thought to be citizens of these United States.

It is obviously a different issue. I mean that is not an unfamiliar kind of joking even from black comedians. In the 20th century on television even later in the 20th century, In Living Color, Red Foxx. It is certainly related to the minstrel tradition and sometimes it can be a move away from the minstrel tradition or it can be a kind of critical kick against the minstrel tradition. But we are definitely talking about a comedic tradition that has been inherited from the minstrel show.

Black performers only take the stage in minstrels in the 1860s after the Civil War in 1870s. The number of black troupes begin to circulate publicly and be very popular. The crazy thing is that when they do so, they also put black face makeup on. It is almost like the ticket of access to the public stage for black entertainers is to put black face on. You simply cannot do it without that stage convention being put on to signify your blackness…to signify that you are playing a role of the black. This is obviously an intensely problematic, racists understanding of black’s capacity for public performance. It is a compromise type of access you might say to the American stage. And it is the tradition under which black entertainers to the present day labor. Because there is always the sense that you have to…and I think even when the audience is largely black audience although that shifts the terrain enormously…there is always a sense in a cross over audience of whites and blacks or maybe primarily whites that you have to, you know, cow tow, bow down to the means of access to public space which is an invocation, operation within the burden of the minstrel tradition which is why black performers often seem so tortuous in a mainstream setting. And it is one reason that you might say that certain forms of hip-hop feel so free and freewheeling because they are not primarily marketed to white audiences. I mean I think there is often a sense among African entertainers that when you are speaking to audiences from where you come from, that there is…that you don’t have to compromise yourself. You don’t have to work within the confines of the minstrel tradition to such an extent. Although I think it is always a factor and a presence.