Blackface is the practice of performers using burnt cork, shoe polish, or theatrical makeup to portray a caricature of black people on stage or in entertainment. Scholarship on the origins or definition of blackface vary with some taking a global perspective that includes European culture and Western colonialism.[1] Scholars with this wider view may date the practice of blackface to as early as Medieval Europe's mystery plays when bitumen and coal were used to darken the skin of white performers portraying demons, devils, and damned souls. Still others date the practice to English Renaissance theatre, in works such as William Shakespeare's Othello.
However, some scholars see blackface as a specific practice limited to American culture that began in the minstrel show; a performance art that originated in the United States in the early 19th century and which contained its own performance practices unique to the American stage. Scholars making this claim see blackface as arising not from a European stage tradition but from the context of class warfare from within the United States, with the American white working poor inventing blackface as a means of expressing their anger over being disenfranchised economically, politically, and socially from middle and upper class White America.
In the United States, the practice of blackface became a popular entertainment during the 19th century into the 20th. It contributed to the spread of racial stereotypes such as "Jim Crow", the "happy-go-lucky darky on the plantation", and "Zip Coon" also known as the "dandified coon".[2][3][4]
By the middle of the 19th century, blackface minstrel shows had become a distinctive American artform, translating formal works such as opera into popular terms for a general audience.[5] Although minstrelsy began with white performers, by the 1840s there were also many all-black cast minstrel shows touring the United States in blackface, as well as black entertainers performing in shows with predominately white casts in blackface. Some of the most successful and prominent minstrel show performers, composers and playwrights were themselves black, such as: Bert Williams, Bob Cole, and J. Rosamond Johnson.
Early in the 20th century, blackface branched off from the minstrel show and became a form of entertainment in its own right,[6] including Tom Shows, parodying abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the United States, blackface declined in popularity from the 1940s, with performances dotting the cultural landscape into the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.[7] It was generally considered highly offensive, disrespectful, and racist by the late 20th century,[8] but the practice (or similar-looking ones) was exported to other countries.[9][10]
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There is no consensus about a single moment that constitutes the origin of blackface. Arizona State University professor Ayanna Thompson links the beginning of blackface to stage practices within the Medieval Europe miracle or mystery plays. It was common practice in Medieval Europe to use bitumen and soot from coal to darken skin to depict corrupted souls, demons, and devils in blackface. Louisiana State University professor Anthony Barthelemy stated, "“In many medieval miracle plays, the souls of the damned were represented by actors painted black or in black costumes.... In [many versions], Lucifer and his confederate rebels, after having sinned, turn black.”[11]
The journalist and cultural commentator John Strausbaugh places it as part of a tradition of "displaying Blackness for the enjoyment and edification of white viewers" that dates back at least to 1441, when captive West Africans were displayed in Portugal.[12] White people routinely portrayed the black characters in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (see English Renaissance theatre), most famously in Othello (1604).[13] However, Othello and other plays of this era did not involve the emulation and caricature of "such supposed innate qualities of Blackness as inherent musicality, natural athleticism", etc. that Strausbaugh sees as crucial to blackface.[12]
A 2023 article appearing on the National Museum of African American History and Culture website, asserts that the birth of blackface is attributable to class warfare:
Historian Dale Cockrell once noted that poor and working-class whites who felt “squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm.[14]
By objectifying formerly enslaved people through demeaning, humor-inducing stock caricatures, "comedic performances of 'blackness' by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up, [could not] be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core".[14] This process of "thingification" has been written about by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, "The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify",[14] and by Aimé Césaire, "Césaire revealed over and over again the colonizers’ sense of superiority and their sense of mission as the world’s civilizers, a mission that depended on turning the Other into barbarians".[15]
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Blackface was a performance tradition in the American theater for roughly 100 years beginning around 1830. It was practiced in Britain as well, surviving longer than in the U.S.; The Black and White Minstrel Show on television lasted until 1978.[13]
In both the United States and Britain, blackface was most commonly used in the minstrel performance tradition, which it both predated and outlasted. Early white performers in blackface used burnt cork and later greasepaint or shoe polish to blacken their skin and exaggerate their lips, often wearing woolly wigs, gloves, tailcoats, or ragged clothes to complete the transformation. According to a 1901 source: "Be careful to get the black even around the eyes and mouth. Leave the lips just as they are, they will appear red to the audience. Comedians leave a wide white space all around the lips. It makes the mouth appear larger and will look red as the lips do. If you wish to represent an old darkey, use white drop chalk, outlining the eyebrows, chin, whisk- ers or a gray beard."[16] Later, black artists also performed in blackface. The famous Dreadnought hoax involved the use of blackface and costume for a group of high-profile authors to gain access to a military vessel.[17]
Stereotypes embodied in the stock characters of blackface minstrels not only played a significant role in cementing and proliferating racist images, attitudes, and perceptions worldwide, but also in popularizing black culture.[18] In some quarters, the caricatures that were the legacy of blackface persist to the present day and are a cause of ongoing controversy. Another view is that "blackface is a form of cross-dressing in which one puts on the insignias of a sex, class, or race that stands in opposition to one's own".[19]
By the mid-20th century, changing attitudes about race and racism effectively ended the prominence of blackface makeup used in performance in the U.S. and elsewhere. Blackface in contemporary art remains in relatively limited use as a theatrical device; today, it is more commonly used as social commentary or satire. Perhaps the most enduring effect of blackface is the precedent it established in the introduction of African-American culture to an international audience, albeit through a distorted lens.[20][21] Blackface's appropriation,[20][21][22] exploitation, and assimilation[20] of African-American culture – as well as the inter-ethnic artistic collaborations that stemmed from it – were but a prologue to the lucrative packaging, marketing, and dissemination of African-American cultural expression and its myriad derivative forms in today's world popular culture.[21][23][24]
Lewis Hallam, Jr., a white blackface actor of American Company fame, brought blackface in this more specific sense to prominence as a theatrical device in the United States when playing the role of "Mungo", an inebriated black man in The Padlock, a British play that premiered in New York City at the John Street Theatre on May 29, 1769.[25] The play attracted notice, and other performers adopted the style. From at least the 1810s, blackface clowns were popular in the United States.[26] British actor Charles Mathews toured the U.S. in 1822–23, and as a result added a "black" characterization to his repertoire of British regional types for his next show, A Trip to America, which included Mathews singing "Possum up a Gum Tree", a popular slave freedom song.[27] Edwin Forrest played a plantation black in 1823,[27] and George Washington Dixon was already building his stage career around blackface in 1828,[28] but it was another white comic actor, Thomas D. Rice, who truly popularized blackface. Rice introduced the song "Jump Jim Crow", accompanied by a dance, in his stage act in 1828,[29] and scored stardom with it by 1832.[30]
First on de heel tap, den on the toe
Every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.
I wheel about and turn about an do just so,
And every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.[31]
Rice traveled the U.S., performing under the stage name "Daddy Jim Crow". The name Jim Crow later became attached to statutes that codified the reinstitution of segregation and discrimination after Reconstruction.[32]
In the 1830s and early 1840s, blackface performances mixed skits with comic songs and vigorous dances. Initially, Rice and his peers performed only in relatively disreputable venues, but as blackface gained popularity they gained opportunities to perform as entr'actes in theatrical venues of a higher class. Stereotyped blackface characters developed: buffoonish, lazy, superstitious, cowardly, and lascivious characters, who stole, lied pathologically, and mangled the English language. Early blackface minstrels were all male, so cross-dressing white men also played black women who were often portrayed as unappealingly and grotesquely mannish, in the matronly mammy mold, or as highly sexually provocative. The 1830s American stage, where blackface first rose to prominence, featured similarly comic stereotypes of the clever Yankee and the larger-than-life Frontiersman;[33] the late 19th- and early 20th-century American and British stage where it last prospered[34] featured many other, mostly ethnically-based, comic stereotypes: conniving Jews;[35][36] drunken brawling Irishmen with blarney;[36][37][38] oily Italians;[36] stodgy Germans;[36] and gullible rural people.[36]
1830s and early 1840s blackface performers performed solo or as duos, with the occasional trio; the traveling troupes that would later characterize blackface minstrelsy arose only with the minstrel show.[39] In New York City in 1843, Dan Emmett and his Virginia Minstrels broke blackface minstrelsy loose from its novelty act and entr'acte status and performed the first full-blown minstrel show: an evening's entertainment composed entirely of blackface performance. (E. P. Christy did more or less the same, apparently independently, earlier the same year in Buffalo, New York.)[40] Their loosely structured show with the musicians sitting in a semicircle, a tambourine player on one end and a bones player on the other, set the precedent for what would soon become the first act of a standard three-act minstrel show.[41] By 1852, the skits that had been part of blackface performance for decades expanded to one-act farces, often used as the show's third act.[42]
In the 1870s the actress Carrie Swain began performing in minstrel shows alongside her husband, the acrobat and blackface performer Sam Swain. It is possible that she was the first woman performer to appear in blackface.[43] Theatre scholar Shirley Staples stated, "Carrie Swain may have been the first woman to attempt the acrobatic comedy typical of male blackface work."[44] She later portrayed the blackface role of Topsy in a musical adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by composer Caryl Florio and dramatist H. Wayne Ellis. It premiered at the Chestnut Street Opera House in Philadelphia on May 22, 1882,[45]
The songs of Northern composer Stephen Foster figured prominently in blackface minstrel shows of the period. Though written in dialect and politically incorrect by modern standards, his later songs were free of the ridicule and blatantly racist caricatures that typified other songs of the genre. Foster's works treated slaves and the South in general with sentimentality that appealed to audiences of the day.[46]
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White minstrel shows featured white performers pretending to be black people, playing their versions of 'black music' and speaking ersatz black dialects. Minstrel shows dominated popular show business in the U.S. from that time through into the 1890s, also enjoying massive popularity in the UK and in other parts of Europe.[47] As the minstrel show went into decline, blackface returned to its novelty act roots and became part of vaudeville.[34] Blackface featured prominently in film at least into the 1930s, and the "aural blackface"[48] of the Amos 'n' Andy radio show lasted into the 1950s.[48] Meanwhile, amateur blackface minstrel shows continued to be common at least into the 1950s.[49] In the UK, one such blackface popular in the 1950s was Ricardo Warley from Alston, Cumbria who toured around the North of England with a monkey called Bilbo.[50]
As a result, the genre played an important role in shaping perceptions of and prejudices about black people generally and African Americans in particular. Some social commentators have stated that blackface provided an outlet for white peoples' fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar, and a socially acceptable way of expressing their feelings and fears about race and control. Writes Eric Lott in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class: "The black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening – and male – Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them."[51]
Blackface, at least initially, could also give voice to an oppositional dynamic that was prohibited by society. As early as 1832, Thomas D. Rice was singing: "An' I caution all white dandies not to come in my way, / For if dey insult me, dey'll in de gutter lay." It also on occasion equated lower-class white and lower-class black audiences; while parodying Shakespeare, Rice sang, "Aldough I'm a black man, de white is call'd my broder."[52]
In the early years of film, black characters were routinely played by white people in blackface. In the first filmic adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903), all of the major black roles were white people in blackface.[53] Even the 1914 Uncle Tom starring African-American actor Sam Lucas in the title role had a white male in blackface as Topsy.[54] D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) used white people in blackface to represent all of its major black characters,[55] but reaction against the film's racism largely put an end to this practice in dramatic film roles. Thereafter, white people in blackface would appear almost exclusively in broad comedies or "ventriloquizing" blackness[56] in the context of a vaudeville or minstrel performance within a film.[57] This stands in contrast to made-up white people routinely playing Native Americans, Asians, Arabs, and so forth, for several more decades.[58]
From the 1910s up until the early 1950s, many well-known entertainers of stage and screen also performed in blackface.[59] Light-skinned people who performed in blackface in film included Al Jolson,[60] Eddie Cantor,[61] Bing Crosby,[60] Fred Astaire, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford, Irene Dunne, Doris Day, Milton Berle, William Holden, Marion Davies, Myrna Loy, Betty Grable, Dennis Morgan, Laurel and Hardy, Betty Hutton, The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Donald O'Connor and Chester Morris and George E. Stone in several of the Boston Blackie films.[61] In 1936, when Orson Welles was touring his Voodoo Macbeth; the lead actor, Maurice Ellis, fell ill, so Welles stepped into the role, performing in blackface.[62]
Blackface makeup was largely eliminated even from live-action film comedy in the U.S. after the end of the 1930s, when public sensibilities regarding race were beginning to change and blackface became increasingly associated with racism and bigotry.[7] As late as the 1940s, Warner Bros. used blackface in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a minstrel show sketch in This Is the Army (1943) and by casting Flora Robson as a Haitian maid in Saratoga Trunk (1945).[63] In The Spoilers (1942), John Wayne appeared in blackface and bantered in a mock accent with a black maid who mistook him for an authentic black man.
Still, the tradition did not end all at once. The radio program Amos 'n' Andy (1928–1960) constituted a type of "oral blackface", in that the black characters were portrayed by white people and conformed to stage blackface stereotypes.[64] The conventions of blackface also lived on unmodified at least into the 1950s in animated theatrical cartoons. Strausbaugh estimates that roughly one-third of late 1940s MGM cartoons "included a blackface, coon, or mammy figure".[65] Bugs Bunny appeared in blackface at least as late as Southern Fried Rabbit in 1953.[66]
Singer Grace Slick was wearing blackface when her band Jefferson Airplane performed "Crown of Creation" and "Lather" at The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968. A clip is included in a 2004 documentary Fly Jefferson Airplane, directed by Bob Sarles.
The 1976 action comedy Silver Streak included a farcical scene in which Gene Wilder must impersonate a black man, as instructed by Richard Pryor. In 1980, an underground film, Forbidden Zone, was released, directed by Richard Elfman and starring the band Oingo Boingo, which received controversy for blackface sequences.[67]
Also in 1980, the white members of UB40 appeared in blackface in their "Dream a Lie" video, while the black members appeared in whiteface to give the opposite appearance.[68]
Trading Places (1983) is a film telling the elaborate story of a commodities banker and street hustler crossing paths after being made part of a bet. The film features a scene between Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Denholm Elliott, and Dan Aykroyd when they must don disguises to enter a train. Aykroyd's character puts on full blackface make-up, a dreadlocked wig and a Jamaican accent to fill the position of a Jamaican pothead. The film, being an obvious satire, has received little criticism for its use of racial and ethnic stereotype due to it mocking the ignorance of Aykroyd's character rather than black people as a whole, with Rotten Tomatoes citing it as "featuring deft interplay between Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykro