Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

A Brief History of Blackface

Blackface minstrelsy, described as a “strange but persistent performance idiom” by one scholar of the practice, was the first uniquely American form of entertainment. For a long time, it was also America's most popular type of entertainment. The practice got its start in the 1820s, when individual white men began to blacken their faces and perform as “Ethiopian delineators.” Blackface performers would use burnt cork or grease paint to darken their skin, put white greasepaint around their mouths to create the appearance of overly large lips, and don wigs of black curly hair. Dressed in tatters or as clowns, blackface performers spoke in exaggerated Negro dialect and sung, danced, and performed comic skits to entertain their audiences. 

Daniel Decatur Emmett was a seminal figure in the development of blackface minstrelsy; indeed, some scholars of blackface draw a line between blackface before Emmett arrived on the scene and blackface after he created the Virginia Minstrels. They argue that blackface before Emmett—when it was still being performed mainly by individual “Ethiopian delineators” on the streets rather than in formal theaters—should be understood as a kind of folk theatrical that offered a way for working class whites to express some solidarity with poor blacks against the white elite and to critique their shared social and political conditions. Historians like W.T. Llamon and Dale Cockrell argue that disempowered whites in the 1830s donned blackface as a way to critique authority, to express frustration with white elites, and to encourage interracial solidarity among poor whites and blacks. Early blackface, these scholars suggest, was not intrinsically racist.

But that changed with the arrival of Emmett and his group, the Virginia Minstrels, on the scene in 1843. Dan Emmett helped turn blackface from a working class street performance to a commercial enterprise aimed at middle class whites. His Virginia Minstrels brought together a group of four performers who did shows in theaters for paying audiences. Their act included music, dancing, comedic dialogue, “stump speeches” of nonsense oratory done in Negro dialect, and walkaround numbers that involved music and dance set on a plantation. Minstrel performers created a cast of stereotypical black characters that were clownish, lazy, hypersexualized, arrogant, and prone to crime. The two main characterizations—of Sambo, a happy-go-lucky slave, and Zip Coon, an arrogant black man in the North—both worked as a kind of defense of slavery by promoting the myth of a benign plantation and by suggesting that blacks in the North were inept fools who did not belong. 

With the advent of the Virginia Minstrels in 1843, minstrelsy became less a form of political subversion—using “the Other” to protest your own social and political situation—than a mockery of the Other. As historian Stephen Johnson writes, “the commercial needs of the early minstrel show altered its most immediate roots in folk tradition and popular street performance, increasingly emphasizing the exhibition of that ‘other’ culture being represented, over confronting one’s own.” The Virginia Minstrels, Johnson argues, “promoted particularly grotesque portrayals of blacks.” Emmett’s group, and the many minstrel troupes its success inspired, denigrated blacks for profit and they had a long and damaging legacy. Dale Cockrell, a historian who argues that Emmett’s creation of the Virginia Minstrels represented a stark turning point in the history of blackface, argues that “by the last third of the century, blackface minstrelsy had become what the Virginia Minstrels forecast: a weapon by which one group of Americans defined, marginalized, and contained another.” 

Blackface minstrelsy went on to dominate early American commercial popular culture, eventually evolving into vaudeville and shaping the history of early motion pictures. Watching these stereotyped performances of blacks allowed whites to feel confident in their superiority. Even when black performers broke into show business after the Civil War, they had to themselves perform as minstrels, acting out the stereotypes that whites had created. The stereotypes and racist symbols blackface performers created have circulated in American popular culture ever since. Although blackface performance had largely disappeared from the American stage and movie screens by the 1950s, it has not disappeared from our national culture. Whites continue to don blackface and to enact the stereotypes associated with it at college parties and in Halloween costumes. The demeaning caricatures that Dan Emmett helped popularize have surely been one of the most influential aspects of his legacy.
 

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