The badman is often connected to the prototype of the “bad n_____” or the bully in African American folklore. He is one of the most important characters in the African American folk tradition, and he is sometimes seen as an integral feature of black cultural production stretching from antebellum folk tales and black minstrelsy to the popular image of contemporary “gangsta” rappers.
Although the badman has often been characterized by a disregard for law and order, unpredictable violence, and love of mayhem, John W. Roberts suggested that most critical discussion of the badman has been based on anarchic depictions of the black badman popularized through the toast tradition. This has usually equated the badman with the “bad n_____” archetype and has resulted in an overemphasis on the destructive and unproductive elements of the badman’s persona, particularly when directed toward the black community. Lawrence Levine distinguishes the explosive violence of black badmen from “good badmen” whose rejection of the law is morally justifiable. In contrast to the “noble outlaws” envisioned by white Americans, the folklore of black badmen did not emerge from a heroic folk tradition in which retaliation against the established order required expressive justification. While white Americans conceptualized outlaws as being able to heroically operate outside of the law only in extraordinary circumstances, African Americans had little reason to see the law as anything but hostile to their interests, and the unlawful activity of black badmen required no explicit rationale. As a result, the signifying upon the adjective most clearly seen through an extensive of the vowel from bad to “ba-ad” represented an inversion of badness or the badman from a negative for whites to a positive for blacks.
The badman’s roots can be traced back to slavery, but his image was crystallized during the late nineteenth century through blues ballads that depicted antiheroes such as Bad-Lan’ Stone and Railroad Bill. Perhaps the most popular badman from these ballads is Stagolee, based on an African American criminal called Lee Shelton from St. Louis who was convicted of killing William “Billy” Lyons in 1895 following a barroom disagreement over a gambling game. In the ballad of Stagolee, the nature of Billy’s death marks Stagolee as a badman, since he inflicted on Billy a punishment that did not fit the crime (Stagolee’s aggression was triggered by Billy winning Stagolee’s hat in the game or snatching it during the ensuing argument):
Stagolee found Billy, “Oh please don’t take my life!
I got three little children, and a very sick little wife.”
Stagolee shot Billy, oh he shot that boy so fas’
That bullet came through him and broke my window glass
The emergence of the badman in the late nineteenth century was born out of new freedoms, and the limitations of those freedoms, for African Americans in the period following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. The trickster characters of African American folklore such as Brer Rabbit, which had been so prevalent under slavery, while still important, could not fully articulate postslavery conditions for the black community. Similarly, the focus of African American artistic expression shifted away from stories centered on the relationship between slave and master toward a more diverse account of the black experience. Black men and women were no longer confined to the plantation or the slave quarters, and despite the failure of Reconstruction, the implementation of restrictive Jim Crow covenants by a resurgent planter elite in the South, and continuing racial violence and oppression nationwide, African Americans had more scope to explore the boundaries of their liberty through the pursuit of entertainment in the barrooms, barrelhouses, and vice districts of towns and cities. Within this context the black badman can be seen to have emerged primarily as a response to the expanding boundaries of black freedom. In the ballad of Stagolee, this is apparent first through the location of the incident in a barroom, and then Stagolee’s freedom to retrieve his gun from home and return to the bar to shoot Billy dead. The badman’s disregard for restrictions on his mobility is even clearer in the ballad of Railroad Bill, who escapes on a freight train after shooting a policeman.
Railroad Bill mighty bad man
Kill McGruder by de light o’ the moon
Wus lookin’ fer Railroad Bill
Railroad Bill went out Wes’
Thought he had dem cowboys bes’
Wus lookin’ fer Railroad Bill
The ballad of Railroad Bill is reportedly based on the exploits of an outlaw named Morris Slater who staged raids along the Louisville and Nashville railroad line in southern Alabama during 1895 and 1896. Louisville police chief J. B. Harlan wrote the official version of Railroad Bill’s life that was published in the L & N Employees’ Magazine in 1927. The piece identified some elements of Bill’s mythic badman status that had begun to develop even before his death. Harlan noted that local blacks believed Railroad Bill held superhuman powers and that he could not be killed by regular bullets, while other accounts celebrated Bill’s ability to escape pursuers by assuming animal form and to provide food for poor local blacks. Harlan admitted that Alabama’s black population frequently protected Bill, which suggests a degree of support and respect for Bill’s actions. Both the image of Bill as a Robin Hood–type figure and his shape-shifting powers place him within a broader African American folk tradition—not as a destructive “bad n_____” style badman but as a transformation of the trickster character and a rearticulation of the “noble outlaw.”
The distinction between the badman and the “bad n_____” is important in charting the transition of the black badman from the ballads of Stagolee and Railroad Bill into broader cultural representation in the twentieth century through the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and the depiction of figures such as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X in the 1960s. In the case of Malcolm X, a figure often portrayed as a “bad n_____” by mainstream media in the 1960s, his “ba-adness” was typified not by indiscriminate violence against the black community but by a strong sense of politics and social protest. More recently the rapper Tupac Shakur’s self-fashioned status as a “thug” and his phrase “thug life” was connected to a glorification of violence and his status as a progeny of the “bad n_____” archetype. However, his lyrical attacks on unjust criminalization, ghetto nihilism, and police brutality can be understood as a continuation of a rich badman folkloric canon rather than the reductionist “bad n_____” trope.
E. James West
See also Ballad; Blues as Folklore; Brer Rabbit; Hurston, Zora Neale; Outlaw Heroes; Stagolee; Toasts
Further Reading
Brown, Cecil. 2003. Stagolee Shot Billy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bryant, Jerry. 2003. Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jeffries, Michael P. 2011. Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Munby, Jonathan. 2011. Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-representation in African American Popular Culture. London: University of Chicago Press.
Roberts, John W. 1989. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.