Minstrel show: Encyclopedia II - Minstrel show - Legacy

Minstrel show - Legacy

Minstrel-show characters played a powerful role in shaping assumptions about African Americans. However, unlike vehemently anti-black propaganda from the time, minstrelsy made this attitude palatable to a wide audience by couching it in the guise of well intentioned paternalism.^[64] Black Americans were in turn expected to uphold these stereotypes, or else risk white retaliation. Some were even killed for defying their minstrelsy-defined roles. Louis Wright, himself a black minstrel, died after being lynched and having his tongue cut out for cursing at some whites who had thrown snowballs at him.^[65]

Popular entertainment perpetuated the racist stereotype of the uneducated, ever-cheerful, and highly musical black well into the 1950s. Even as the minstrel show was dying out, blackface performers became common acts on vaudeville stages and in legitimate theater. These entertainers kept the familiar songs, dances, and pseudo-black dialect, often in nostalgic looks back at the old minstrel show. The most famous of these performers is probably Al Jolson, who took blackface to the big screen in the 1920s in films such as The Jazz Singer (1927). Likewise, when the sound era of cartoons began in the late 1920s, early animators such as Walt Disney gave characters like Mickey Mouse (who already resembled blackface performers) a minstrel-show personality as well; the early Mickey is constantly singing and dancing and smiling.^[66] Radio shows also got into the act, a fact perhaps best exemplified by the popular Amos & Andy program. As recently as the mid-1970s the BBC screened The Black and White Minstrel Show on television, starring the George Mitchell Minstrels. The racist archetypes that blackface minstrelsy helped to create still persist to this day; some argue that this is even true in hip-hop culture and movies. The 2000 Spike Lee movie Bamboozled alleges that modern black entertainment is nothing more than an outgrowth of the minstrel shows of a century past, for example.

Meanwhile, African American actors were limited to the same old minstrel-defined roles for years to come and by playing them, made them more believable to white audiences. On the other hand, these parts opened the entertainment industry to African American performers and gave them their first opportunity to alter those stereotypes. Many famous singers and actors gained their start in black minstrelsy, including Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Butterbeans and Susie.

The very structure of American entertainment also bears minstrelsy's imprint. The endless barrage of gags and puns appear in the work of the Marx Brothers and David and Jerry Zucker. The varied structure of songs, gags, and dramatic pieces continued into vaudeville, variety shows, and to modern sketch comedy shows like Hee Haw or, more distantly, Saturday Night Live and In Living Color. Jokes once delivered by endmen are still told today: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?" Other jokes form part of the repertoire of modern comedians: "Who was that lady I saw you with last night? That was no lady—that was my wife!"^[67]

Another important legacy of minstrelsy is its music. Many minstrel tunes are still popular folk songs sung today. Most have been expunged of the exaggerated black dialect and the overt references to blacks. "Dixie", for example, was adopted by the Confederacy as its unofficial national anthem and remains popular today, and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" was sanitized and made the state song of Virginia (until 1997, when its association with racism resulted in its removal as state song) ^[68]. "My Old Kentucky Home" remains the state song of Kentucky. The instruments of the minstrel show were also largely kept on, especially in the South. Minstrel performers from the last days of the shows, such as Uncle Dave Macon, helped popularize instruments such as the banjo and fiddle in modern Country-Western music. And by introducing America to black dance and musical style, minstrelsy opened the nation to black cultural forms for the first time on a large scale.^[69]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Legacy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki