A closer look

Black Performers in Blackface

How did African American performers navigate racist cultural expectations at the turn of the twentieth century?
Note: This resource includes offensive racial stereotypes and language that were common early twentieth-century media and popular culture.

by Karen Sotiropoulos, Cleveland State University

In the 1830s, while abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric heated American politics, an actor of Irish descent named Thomas “Daddy” Rice darkened his face and took to the stage lampooning Black people and giving birth to what became the most popular form of entertainment in nineteenth-century America—blackface minstrelsy. His character, “Jim Crow,” became synonymous with segregation in America after the Supreme Court decided that separate was equal in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. By the end of the nineteenth century, the minstrel stage gave way to vaudeville—a hodgepodge of comedy, dance, and even sports performances known for its low ticket prices, which made entertainment accessible to mass audiences. Black performers envisioned vaudeville as offering a venue to educate as well as entertain. They capitalized on white America’s love of blackface minstrelsy by enacting their own versions of the popular art form, critiquing its racist underpinnings even while using the stereotypical form of blackface in their sketches.

Double Consciousness

Like the whole of U.S. society, theaters were segregated at the dawn of the twentieth century. Black stage artists who sought to reach both white and Black audiences had to navigate more than the physically segregated space of the theater. As they made their way in Jim Crow America, they lived daily the “double-consciousness” that poets and writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and W. E. B. Du Bois described as “this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.” Aware of the pervasive white gaze but also committed to serving their community, Black artists incorporated the racist tropes of minstrelsy that would please white audiences, but manipulated that imagery in ways that Black audiences would understand as critique.

The Black stage duo Bert Williams and George Walker exemplified this act of double-consciousness. A light-skinned Bahamian-born comedian, Williams performed in blackface makeup for the entirety of a career that spanned the years from 1896, when he first partnered with George Walker in vaudeville, until his death in 1922. His performances included African-themed musicals that broke the color line on Broadway, a solo act he did with the long-running variety show the Ziegfeld Follies (world famous for its chorus girls), and the short silent film The Natural Born Gambler. He never appeared in blackface in the Black press, however. In 1899, Williams and Walker placed an advertisement in the Indianapolis Freeman newspaper, wishing its Black readership “Holiday Greetings.” The dignified self-representation of Williams and Walker that appeared in their ad was typical of coverage in the Black press, which also wrote about them as successful businessmen and skilled performers. But these types of portraits seldom appeared in white press at the time. White newspapers sometimes published shots of the actors in costume, but more often, they relied on caricatured drawings that gave new life to old minstrel show stereotypes.

Both Black and white critics used the terms “darky” and “coon.” Black reviewers, however, used the terms solely to refer to the staged characters, as in “coon comedy” or “darky act.” This convention made clear that Williams and Walker and their generation of performers were consciously using stereotypes—a language of racism—in their art. In contrast, the white press used those same words to refer to the actors themselves, blurring and even erasing the line between person and performance. Typical of white reviews were comments such as: “Williams is a light colored darkey and has to use make-up in order to become the black coon that he represents on stage.” [1]

Playing over the Heads of the White Audience

Black performers made these white misunderstandings central to their stage work in a kind of ruse that their Black audiences well understood. When bluesman W. C. Handy sought a white audience for his band’s music, he staged a fight, knowing that a white crowd would gather to watch Black men brawl, and then when the crowd gathered—complete with a cop in on the take—he bowled them over with his music. Handy later bragged “our hokum hooked them.” [2] White reviewers often commented on which section of the segregated theater laughed when—useful commentary for historians looking to discern audience response by race. For example, Black audiences laughed uproariously at Bandana Land, a show that portrayed the comic duo as forcing the white proprietors of an amusement park to purchase neighboring land from a Black realty company at a wildly inflated price. The Black characters played by Williams and Walker bought shares and then organized a big “noisy negro jubilee” that played into white stereotypes of loud Black partiers and encouraged the quick sale. That whites were taken in by their own prejudice seemed to have flown over the heads of white audiences; and the Black laughter reaffirmed white reviewers’ conviction that the singing and dancing “darky act” they saw on stage represented real life. Black reviewers, of course, had no need to explain the laughter to their Black readers, but rather commented on how skilled the Black performers were in navigating the color line of the American psyche.

Double Messages in the Era’s Sheet Music

The Williams and Walker Company produced shows for live theater, but their songs were sold through print in the form of sheet music. White music publishers controlled the market and sold both white- and Black-authored songs with grotesque caricatures as cover illustrations. Since certain renditions of dialect speech had long been a part of blackface minstrelsy’s derision of African Americans, Black songwriters had to pay close attention to the style of language they used as well as to its content. Carefully examining the era’s sheet music suggests that Black composers consciously worked hokum into their lyrics by addressing Black and white audiences differently with their juxtaposition of chorus and verse. In Black-authored songs, the term “coon” appeared most often in the chorus, the refrain repeated and remembered by theatergoers, while the longer verse told stories drawn from the daily life of Black Americans. [document 6] The sheet music lyrics about Black-controlled spaces eluded white audiences much like the jokes that had gone over their heads.

Examining the available photographs and song sheets in the context of the improvisational world of live theater clarifies how much these Black artists were involved in a complex conversation about race as they attempted to unseat the very stereotypes they used. They were not simply catering to the market for white racist desire, but rather hoped that their white audiences would eventually understand that they were not that which they performed. If they were ultimately unable to convince white audiences of their humanity, by the 1920s they were somewhat successful in making Black art that white people would desire instead of fear or mock. The Williams and Walker generation had ushered in a new era—one where there was no need for hokum. Black music, Black dance, and Black style had become all the rage in the Harlem Renaissance, even as the dual conversations about race continued, with white audiences viewing Black performance in segregated spaces and finding new ways to assess what they thought constituted “Negro art.” By 1926, Black popular theater moved from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s mask that “grins and lies” to Langston Hughes’s embrace of Black artists who produced art “without fear or shame.”

[1] Unidentified clipping, Williams and Walker, Billy Rose Theater Archives, NYPL, 1905.

[2] W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography by W. C. Handy, ed. Arna Bontemps (New York: Da Capo Press, 1941), 149.

Reflection Questions

What aspects of history does the concept of double-consciousness help you understand?

How does the history of the performing arts reflect larger themes in U.S. history?

What kind of sources can be used as evidence for the history of culture and artists?

How do you think the experiences of Black performers have changed over the past century?

Additional Reading

Camille Forbes, Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Related Chapters

Change and Continuity in Daily Life, 1900-1914