Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie : The Commemoration of Dan Emmett

Part III: Debating and Defending the Legacy of Dan Emmett

“I think I might take a knee, mom,” my then 15-year old son told me over the kitchen table as he wolfed down his afterschool snack of multiple grilled cheese sandwiches. It was 2017 and NFL players around the country had been making headlines by kneeling  during the National Anthem to protest police brutality and to show their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. My son wasn’t a football player; he was a member of his high school marching band, and in a few days time, he was expected to perform with the band at the annual local arts and music festival, held every August in Mount Vernon, a town of about 17,000 in central Ohio. His potential symbolic protest wasn’t about Travyon Martin or Tamir Rice, or any of the seemingly endless list of young black men gunned by police or vigilantes. It was aimed at the festival itself. The Dan Emmett Arts and Music Festival.

Mount Vernon’s Dan Emmett festival is a traditional weekend-long small town affair. The marching band performs, local music groups play, a minor country singer is brought in to do the big concert. Afficiandos show off their antique cars. Crafts vendors sell their wares, politicians wander looking for votes, and everyone eats far too much fried food. In many ways, it is like any other small town festival. Except, of course, for its name. Daniel Decatur Emmett, was one of the most successful blackface minstrel performers of his era. Emmett, a Mount Vernon native made it big performing in blackface with his group the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s and 1850s. While no household name today,

but chances are you know some of his music. A prolific composer, he is credited with writing such well-known tunes as Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in “de” Straw, and—most notably—Dixie, which became the battle song for the South during the Civil War.

For my son, having to perform at the festival represented something of a personal affront. The residents of Mount Vernon are overwhelmingly white—95.1 per cent white, in fact, according to the U.S. Census. My biracial son was one of only a handful of nonwhite kids in the marching band and just about the only student in the band who identified as Black. He did not want to play at a festival that honored someone who he felt demeaned his humanity.
 

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