America in Blackface: Photos from the Farm Security Administration

This is weird little photograph.  (You'll want to click directly on it to see a larger version.)  It shows a slightly bewildered group of white southern school kids gathering around their teacher to have blackface makeup put on their face and arms, and one little girl, looking in a mirror, scrutinizing her teacher's work.  It's shocking and repugnant.  The more you look at it, the more disturbing it becomes.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Second and third grade children being made up for their Negro song and dance at May Day-Health Day festivities. Ashwood Plantations, South Carolina.  1939.  (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

But it wasn't always so.  When Marion Post Wolcott made the photo, in 1939, while she was working for Roy Stryker's legendary documentary project at the Farm Security Administration [FSA], there was nothing shocking about it.  The photo captured perfectly ordinary preparations for a perfectly ordinary school festival.  Most people who saw it would probably have been charmed.  Seventy-one years ago, the white kids in blackface were cute.

Dorothea Lange:  Camp talent provides music for dancing at Shafter camp for migrants.  Halloween party, Shafter, California.  1938.

It wasn't just a Southern thing.  Seventy-two years ago, blackface masquerading in a migrant workers' camp in California was, among other things, one more way of dressing up for a costume party.

 

Dorothea Lange:  Camp talent provides music for dancing at Shafter camp for migrants.  Halloween party, Shafter, California.  1938.

As much as we'd like to, we can't honestly read the expressions on the faces of these men in blackface.  We're tempted to say that at least one of them looks like a kid who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  We'd almost certainly be wrong.

Ben Shahn:  Circus poster, Circleville, Ohio. 1938.

It's hard to over-emphasize how commonplace blackface forms of entertainment were in American culture, during the first half of the twentieth century.  It was inescapable -- on stage, in movie theaters, at circuses, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards, and even on the radio.

Walker Evans:  Minstrel poster.  Alabama.  1936.

Blackface wasn't new.  As this poster suggests, it has roots in minstrelsy.  (You can enlarge the photo by clicking directly on the image.  It deserves a closer look.)  Even though actors sometimes blackened their faces in Shakespeare's day, blackface first became a popular form of entertainment -- the most popular form of entertainment -- in nineteenth-century America, when, as Eric Lott puts it in Love and Theft:  Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, white men began to caricature blacks "for sport and profit."

 

Sheet music for a nineteenth-century minstrel song.  (Blackface minstrelsy was a global phenomenon.  This song was published in England.  The image is from the Life magazine photo archive, hosted by Google.)

Many aspects of blackface minstrelsy drew upon and reinforced attitudes that were deeply hostile to African-Americans.  They and their culture were mimicked, lampooned, and held up to ridicule.

The title of Lott's book, however, alerts us that blackface was a complex phenomenon.  Yes, there was the theft, distortion, and denigration of African-American culture.  But there was also love.  Or, at least, the desire to appropriate elements of blackness which seemed to offer an alternative to the constraints of whiteness.

John Collier:  Bridgeton, New Jersey.  FSA (Farm Security Administration) agricultural workers' camp. Colored minstrels advertising their show.  1942.

To put it another way, black was cool.

The music and dance of the black community were new, exciting, and astonishingly beautiful, and whites wanted to sing black songs and dance black steps.  They wanted to experience blackness, while keeping actual blacks a safe distance away.  Love and theft, lure and loathing co-existed in an uneasy embrace.

It was this ambivalence -- the fact that blackface was not entirely about hatred -- that allowed African-American entertainers to participate minstrelsy and sometime to go as far as blackening their faces.  Given the racial climate of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blackface was, as Michael Rogin wrote in Blackface, White Noise:  Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, "...the vehicle by which black performers... gained access to the stage."

John Vachon:  High school jazz band.  Sikeston Missouri.  1940.

For the most part, the black public accepted blackface minstrelsy.  They objected, of course, to coarse and brutal caricatures.  And some African-American intellectuals, such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, deplored everything about it.

Premier of "The Jazz Singer," starring Al Jolson, New York City, 1927.

But black audiences (largely segregated, even in the North) were as thrilled by Al Jolson's blackface performance in The Jazz Singer as were whites.  It was, of course, the first "talkie."  Nobody had ever seen or heard anything like it.  Just as importantly, as far as African-Americans were concerned, Jolson's blackface was permissible blackface.  They knew that he had, to quote Rogin, "always avoided performing the most grotesque caricatures."

Bing Crosby in blackface.  A still from the movie "Holiday Inn" (1942).

The photo above is from 1942.  A year later, Crosby again appeared in blackface, starring in the movie Dixie as Dan Emmett, the most popular blackface minstrel of the mid-nineteenth century and the man who was credited with composing the song "Dixie."  You can read all about it in the June 5th, 1943 edition of Life.

I'm not picking on Jolson and Crosby.  Fred Astaire  (in Swingtime, 1936), Mickey Rooney (in Babes in Arms, 1939), and many of the biggest actors of their day also appeared in blackface.  The practice continued well into the '40s.  And that's the point.  What shocks us today was good fun (as most people saw it) not very long ago.

These days, blackface scenes are often cut from old movies when they're shown on television in an attempt to protect us from our own history.

Actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll in blackface, as radio characters Amos 'n Andy.  Life magazine.  1935.  Copyright, Time Inc.

Radio may not be a visual medium, but blackface found a home there, too.  Amos 'n Andy was the most popular radio program in the nation in the '30 and '40s, with both white and black audiences.  It featured white actors -- Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll -- vocally imitating African-American characters.  (They wore blackface for publicity photos and personal appearances.)  When the show moved to television, after World War 2, black actors were cast.  But times had changed.  And so had African-Americans.

When the NAACP and other civil rights organizations objected to the demeaning stereotypes on which Amos 'n Andy was built, people in positions of power began to listen.  CBS took it off the prime-time schedule in 1953.

Amos 'n Andy's cancellation marked the beginning of the end for blackface.  It certainly didn't disappear overnight, but by the mid-'60s it was something most people found embarrassing, at the very least.

Literal blackface has disappeared, except in the hands of the clueless, the shameless, and the avowedly racist.  Metaphorical blackface may be a different story.  I'll let you make up your own minds about acts like the Blues Brothers and Eminem.

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I'll close with one last photo, something from my own university.

 

Rufus W. Holsinger:  Glee Club, University of Virginia.  1917.  Holsinger Studio Collection, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

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Note:  The photos in this post by Marion Post Wolcott, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, John Collier, and John Vashon are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, at the Library of Congress.  The collection, like all good archives, helps us to remember even those things we would prefer to forget.

Comments

[Stan B.]

Blackface has always struck me as one of the most perverted forms of degradation ever put upon African Americans. And as you well note, it's also a most complex American "aberration." Slavery and lynching are easy to understand. Whites voluntarily dressing up as (and "celebrating") those they so despise and denigrate- just what is one to make of that?

Your comments begin to shed some light on this most bizarre of American traditions. On the other hand, how does one begin to address that many of same whites who attended such celebratory entertainment were also enthusiastic participants in your local, neighborhood lynchings?

[Tim Jarrett]

As the historian of the Virginia Glee Club, learning about the group's blackface history has been painful. There has been some additional documentation of this period and some context around that blackface photo has recently surfaced on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=G9pKAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22university%20of%20virginia%22%20%22glee%20club%22&client=firefox-a&pg=PA314#v=onepage&f=false

The linked page and the pages following, from the UVA yearbook, describe the play from which those blackface pictures are drawn. There's more documentary evidence that I have summarized on my blog:

http://www.jarretthousenorth.com/2009/07/31/virginia-glee-club-the-musical-comedy-years/

Over the years, the group evolved from a student-led club to part of the music department and shifted from a vaudeville oriented performance tradition to a more classically focused one. But it's fascinating to me how popular this was.

[John Edwin Mason]

Thanks very much for your comments and for the links, Tim.

"...learning about the group's blackface history has been painful."

Yes, but I hope that it hasn't been too painful.

But we have to understand the Glee Club's blackface performance in the context of the era. I hope that was clear in my post.