Minstrel shows were enacted on the screen and stage and were popular throughout the United States during the 1800s to early 1900s. As a whole, they operated under the presumption of African American racial inferiority. Beginning with the actor and writer Thomas Dartmouth Rice, minstrel shows presented stereotypical characters such as Zip Coon and Sambo primarily as a defense of slavery and as evidence of blacks’ overall inability to adjust to both the intellectual and social standards of white society. In 1828, Rice, dressed in tattered clothes and blackface, entered a theater in New York and imitated the song-and-dance routines he saw performed by rural and urban blacks. In doing so, Rice gave birth to Jim Crow as a racial caricature—an exaggerated version of the folk trickster popular in the African American tradition—made popular among white audiences as a source of ridicule and entertainment. Minstrel shows came to represent the pervasive myths and stereotypes regarding the African American people during slavery until the first inklings of the civil rights movement, when social perceptions of race and race relations finally began to change.
In its formative years, the minstrel show gained popularity with the Virginia Minstrels of the early 1840s and 1850s. A quartet of banjo-plucking, tambourine-tapping white men in blackface, the Virginia Minstrels expanded the delineations of T. D. Rice to wild acclaim, sparking a multitude of imitators who toured the country, not only exciting white audiences with their comedic portrayals of blacks, but also spreading the stereotypes upon which those portrayals were built. The Virginia Minstrels, headed by Daniel Decatur Emmett, were even invited to the White House in 1844 to perform for the president and his family. The Virginia Minstrels therefore represented a shift in the minstrel tradition toward group performance, each actor depicting a unique caricature of black culture to satisfy the demands of an ever-growing audience nationwide and to gain an edge in what proved to be a competitive minstrel market.
Another noteworthy minstrel act of the nineteenth century was the Christy Minstrels, founded by Edwin P. Christy in 1843. Producing shows for nearly a decade, the Christy Minstrels developed the three-part structure that later became the predominant model for minstrel shows. These centered on Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, two blackface artists, as well as a white interlocutor whose jokes, comic songs, and imitation of the cakewalk appealed to the eager white masses. The Christy Minstrel performances were influential in shaping minstrel thought. The group eventually specialized in the songs of Stephen Foster such as “Old Folks at Home,” which Christy purchased from Foster for the group’s exclusive use. The song, written in 1851, is narrated from the first-person persona of a slave whose nostalgic longing for the old plantation of his youth served as a counterimage to the abolitionist representation of the evils of slavery. As Harlem Renaissance poet and scholar Sterling A. Brown contends in “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” such depictions were instrumental in skewing the image of slavery and casting the former slave as a wretched freedman.
Wm. H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee poster starring Billy Van “The Monologue Comedian,” ca. 1900. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and persisting well into the twentieth, such racist entertainments were based upon demeaning stereotypes thought humorous by an audience convinced of their own racial superiority. Firmly grounded in white myths and folklore associated with slavery and then Jim Crow, the minstrel show offers insight into foundational belief systems that have buttressed American institutionalized racism for centuries. (Library of Congress)
These minstrel shows that emerged were, in large part, based in the plantation tradition of the antebellum South. Mimicking the dialect of the uneducated slaves whose linguistic variations and culturally specific idioms were perceived as evidence of their inability ever fully to assimilate to American life, these shows offered an exaggerated rendition of African American speech in the form of characters such as Zip Coon. Dressed in a top hat and tuxedo, Zip Coon attempted to speak on core issues of American intellectual life, but, as a racial caricature built upon racist notions of black intellect and culture, he proved virtually unintelligible, much to the delight of white audiences. Zip Coon, when coupled with the singing, laughing Sambo, was intended as a defense of slavery—a core part of the antiabolition movement enacted largely in the literature and popular culture of the time. These racial caricatures, after all, seemed to reinforce the notion of racial inferiority embodied in the era’s stereotypes.
In addition to the characters of Zip Coon and Sambo, as presented in these early productions, the minstrel films and shows reintroduced caricatures of white-authored antebellum fiction, bringing renewed attention to the Mammy and Uncle characters as extensions of the minstrel stage. The Mammy, a rather large and dark black woman stripped of any sexual presence, was a servile character who devoted her life wholeheartedly to meeting her mistress’s and master’s every need. Depicted by black actresses such as Hattie McDaniel in such films as Gone with the Wind (1939), the Mammy was one of the nostalgic figures of slavery reintroduced. Similarly, the Uncle caricature, largely based on Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was equally servile and devoted to his beloved white owners. Through actors such as Bill Robinson, more commonly known as “Bojangles,” this caricature always accepted his inferior position with a smile and a warm laugh. As a result, both characters ultimately served as a defense of slavery, encouraging the myth of African American complacency in the limited and menial roles they were often allocated.
Over time, minstrel shows moved beyond ridicule of the African American race into infantilized, incorrigible, and unintelligent caricatures. Minstrel shows and songs, as well as their film and cartoon adaptations, incorporated an element of violence toward blacks. Scenes such as the roasting and burning of blacks reflected the underlying racial tensions of the era and paralleled the actual violence commonplace in American society, particularly as blacks fled the South in droves during the great African American migration of the early 1900s. These scenes were later translated into a multitude of racially controversial cartoons, many illustrating characters like little black Sambo burning in the sun, devoured by crocodiles, and hunted by tigers. These cartoons, such as the 1941 Walter Lantz cartoon “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,” seemed to encourage racial stereotyping, illustrating blacks with chimpanzee-like characteristics and as lazy, razor-wielding “darkies.” In essence, these cultural products were the residual influence of minstrel shows, its characters infiltrating the American cultural imagination and shaping the predominant perception of blacks as an inferior subspecies of human.
The minstrel tradition, however, was not solely developed through white actors like Rice or the Virginia Minstrels. Eventually, black actors also took to the minstrel stage, their faces coated in black soot and their lips exaggerated to meet the expectation of white audiences. Perhaps the most popular of these actors was Bert Williams (1874–1922). Born Egbert Austin Williams, he first gained attention with his minstrel duo, “Williams and Walker.” He and George Walker performed a series of songs, dances, and comic skits in blackface, falling into traditional roles and stereotypes of vaudeville such as the trickster and the “dumb coon.” Billed in the early 1900s as “Two Real Coons,” the duo quickly rose in fame and popularity among American audiences, writing, producing, and performing in the first full-length black musical comedy on Broadway, entitled In Dahomey.
Jim Crow
Thomas Dartmouth Rice, aka “Jim Crow Rice” or “Daddy Rice,” has the dubious distinction of being credited with the explosive expansion of the blackface minstrel show during the course of the nineteenth century, especially due to the wide popularity of his number entitled “Jump Jim Crow,” first performed in 1828. Although Rice died in 1860, his stage name lived on in the post–Civil War, or “Jim Crow,” South. In that context, “Jim Crow” refers to the institutionalized racism endemic throughout the South from the end of Reconstruction to the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. “Jim Crow laws” established and enforced racial segregation by statute, which meant that everyday life—and specifically schools and services such as hotels, restaurants, bus seats, drinking fountains, toilets, and swimming pools—were divided on the basis of race. “Jim Crow” has thus become American shorthand for the evils of segregation.
C. Fee
Though his earlier performances perpetuated the myths and reinforced the racial caricatures so popular among white audiences at the time, Williams eventually worked to humanize the black characters he portrayed and to challenge the stereotypes of his people. In the song “Nobody” of the 1906 production of Abyssinia, Williams used his melancholy voice and half-spoken musical approach to convey the pain buried beneath the blackface mask. While the song certainly served as entertainment for the droves of white audiences that flocked to these productions, “Nobody,” which became Williams’s signature song, emphasized an underlying message of the discontentment brewing underneath the smile and gentle laugh. This approach, as Marlon Riggs contends in his 1987 documentary Ethnic Notions, enabled Williams eventually to remove much of the racist imagery of his earlier works and to begin a slow transformation away from the caricature-based minstrel tradition. The loss of this blackface artist in his stereotypical role was a precursor for the tradition’s eventual decline.
In the end, the minstrel tradition could not last. Built upon horribly flawed racial notions and overtly racist social constructions, minstrel shows represented a way of thinking that was ultimately doomed within the larger United States—a position of black inferiority later challenged by blacks’ contributions to American society and by the civil rights movement that sought equality for African Americans. Still, the minstrel shows represent a significant aspect of American popular culture. These shows sparked an ongoing conversation of race critiqued in literature from Langston Hughes’s “Minstrel Man” to the minstrel scene abroad in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, all of which engaged the myth of race as biological and hierarchical and revealed it instead as a social construction. The stereotypes these shows perpetuated are therefore vital to understanding the racism of urban legends, the racial undertone to popular myths, and the concept of race as understood in the time of slavery, the Reconstruction period, and the pre–civil rights era across the United States.
Christopher Allen Varlack
See also Ballads; Folklore and Folktales
Further Reading
Bean, Annemarie, James Vernon Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds. 1996. Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-century Blackface Minstrelsy. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press.
Toll, Robert C. 1974. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.