Fear of the Blackface Minstrel
by Mark Anthony Neal
At the peak of his career, actor, singer and dancer Ben Vereen was asked to perform at an inaugural celebration for Ronald Reagan in January of 1981. With a successful career on the stage, winning a Tony Award for Pippin in 1973, Vereen become a household name on the strength of his role as Chicken George, grandson of Kunte Kinte, in the ground-breaking mini-series Roots (1977). With access, perhaps, to his greatest stage, Vereen chose to pay tribute to America’s first Black cross-over artist, Bert Williams.
Williams, who was the first African-American to have a starring role for the famed Ziegfeld Follies in 1910 and who with partner George Walker once labeled their minstrel act as “two real coons,” is today, the most well-known Black-face minstrel.
Born in the Bahamas in 1874, Williams’ performance of so-called “authentic” Black American culture, made him a major star. With his mainstream success, Williams paved the way for generations of Black stage and movie performers, though the Blackface minstrelsy that was his vehicle is often looked back on with disdain and shame.
It was perhaps such shame that Vereen was hoping to address, when he began performing tributes to Williams in the early 1970s. As Vereen told the Los Angeles Times in 1975, “I’m dealing with cleaning up Black history—the uncle Tom/coon era. Bert was one of the highest paid vaudevillians, yet he couldn’t share a dressing room with a white man.” Given his history of portraying Williams, Vereen probably thought nothing about the performance as he stepped on stage that evening in January of 1981, even as Black leaders had already dubbed the Reagan presidency as a major set-back for Civil Rights.
As part of his performance, Vereen began with an introduction that explained the indignities that Williams faced, including the task of putting charcoal on his face on a nightly basis, in order to be transformed into the “darky” that White Americans—and quite a few Black Americans—found so alluring. Unfortunately, when Vereen’s performance was aired by CBS, the introduction was edited out.
As Camille Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star, describes the performance, “the appearance included only an image of Ben Vereen, a black man, seemingly shuffling and dancing in blackface.”
Negative reaction to Vereen’s performance was relatively swift, this in the era before 24-hour news coverage and social media. Noted Black journalist Williams Raspberry queried in the Washington Post, “What sort of commentary was this on the prospective relationship between black America and the Reagan administration?…Didn’t Ben Vereen in particular understand the hazard implicit in re-awakening this shameful stereotype?”
Earl Calloway, writing in the Pittsburgh Courier was less diplomatic: “last night’s performance was a devastating blow to the progress of social and economical equality which black Americans have received in entertainment.”
The controversy speaks to the ways that the images of Blackness are intimately related to how Black Americans feel about their political realities. Vereen had previously performed his Bert Williams tribute for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford without much comment, but the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 raised the stakes associated with the circulation of so-called negative stereotypes.
For his part, Vereen was clear about his intent, telling The Washington Post, “I was trying to say that Blackness didn’t start with The Supremes. I was trying to show a part of our history that needs to be seen and heard. I am very proud of my heritage.” Vereen also wanted to bring the Williams’ brilliance back from obscurity. As he told television host Tony Brown, many audiences simply didn’t know he was paying tribute to a Black man, as many only recalled the Blackface minstrelsy of the White performer Al Jolson.
The stakes were just as high, perhaps thirty years later when The Scottsboro Boys, a Broadway musical featuring minstrel performances and a few seconds of blackface opened to positive reviews and even more controversy.
Featuring a score by Joseph Kander and the late Fred Ebb—the team behind Kiss of the Spider Woman and Chicago—and direction by Susan Stroman, who has won multiple Tony Awards for direction and choreography, The Scottsboro Boys attempted to tell the story of nine African-American boys and teenagers, who were falsely accused of gang raping two White women in 1931. The case was legendary for the blatant racism that ignored the innocence of the boys and the initial reticence of the NAACP to provide defense for the boys (The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the American Communist Party, instead stepped in).
To be sure the use of minstrelsy represents an unconventional way to tell such a story, though as playwright and scholar Lisa B. Thompson argues, “The Scottsboro Boys brings all that pathos to the stage through a clever use of minstrelsy, a controversial theatrical form from a bygone era, in order to foreground the performance of race. The jovial abandon of the opening number, “Minstrel March” also named “Hey, Hey! Hey!” belies the somber subject matter, yet also keenly illustrates the ways black suffering has served as entertainment.”
The nuanced view of American racism that Kander and the show’s producers hoped to create was lost on a group of African-American activists who quickly sought to shut the show down. New York City councilman Charles Barron told the Amsterdam News, “We are going to shut down this so-called play. There are no Black people who should be paying to see this minstrel show. It is an insult.”
Also in the Amsterdam News, spokesperson for the Freedom Party asserted that “This ‘musical comedy’ makes a mockery of a historic travesty of justice with total disregard for the humanity and suffering of the judicial lynchings that have marred the history of the United States then and now.”
Of course the backdrop of such claims is the desire to police the images of Blackness in a country still exhibiting the growing pains of having its first Black president and the seaming increase of popular imagery that depicts President Obama and Black Americans in general as less-than-human.
Though the Scottsboro Boys was forced to close after less than 50 shows, the show recently received 12 Tony Award Nominations—the most ever for a closed show.
Thompson, who teaches African-American drama and literature at the State University of New York at Albany and whose play Single Black Female had a successful Off-Broadway run in 2008, notes that “It’s tragic that the musical closed on Broadway after only 49 performances. Fortunately The Scottsboro Boys will have a national tour so that new audiences will have an opportunity to not only learn about this historic episode, but also about the foundations and persistence of racial performance.”
But the questions remains, do images of Blackface minstrelsy and other popular images associated with America’s racist past (and present) represent the same kinds of threats to Black political, cultural and economic autonomy that they represented a hundred years ago, when Bert Williams was at his commercial peak or even a generation ago when Ben Vereen paid tribute to Williams?
'Scottsboro Boys':
Flawed by its form
- Article by: ROHAN PRESTON , Star Tribune
- Updated: May 3, 2011 - 11:34 AM
After seeing the Kander and Ebb musical "The Scottsboro Boys" at the Guthrie, a critic reflects on its use of minstrelsy.
Scientists tap toxic substances for medicines. Some blacks use the pungent N-word with endearment, to much confusion and consternation.
Can minstrelsy help undo the racial stereotyping it embedded in our culture?
That is a question raised by "The Scottsboro Boys," the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical that is up at the Guthrie Theater for two more weeks before heading to Broadway.
The musical is inspired by a notorious miscarriage of justice. In 1931, nine black teens on a train in Alabama were falsely accused of raping two white women, a capital crime. During the 1930s, the young men repeatedly were tried and found guilty, with their cases getting precedent-setting hearings at the Supreme Court.
Minstrel-show cartoons
For all its clever stagecraft by five-time Tony-winner Susan Stroman and its notable performances by an adept company, "Scottsboro" is limited by its form.
Popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, minstrelsy was sometimes used by abolitionists to further their cause. But it was mostly the onstage companion to a virulent off-stage campaign to deny African-Americans their humanity and freedom. White men blackened their faces to play "darkies" -- a practice later taken up by some black performers -- reducing a people to stage slurs.
Stock roles on the minstrel circuit included dandy but ignorant "coons" who mangled big words; watermelon-eating Tambos who longed to return to plantation slavery, and animalistic Jim Crows. What claim could such cartoons have had on American citizenship?
"Scottsboro" sanitizes and, in its postmodern detachment, mildly subverts this history. Still, with its facile puns and stylized dancing, the show stirs up a welter of ghosts. Through its updated minstrelsy, "Scottsboro" cuts into old wounds. And it treats the mortal peril of its characters as peculiar entertainment.
I understand the creative team's desire to use Brechtian distancing so that we can process the ugly events with cool dispassion. But the technique is tricky. And it left me not just at a remove, but also alienated.
Which is a shame, because "Scottsboro" was crafted by the smart songwriting duo that gave us "Chicago" and "Cabaret." All three Kander and Ebb shows are anchored in actual events and set around the same decades. "Chicago," which takes place during Prohibition, has foxy killers Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly at its razzle-dazzling core. "Cabaret," set in a nightclub in a Germany being taken over by Nazis, orbits British singer Sally Bowles, American writer Cliff Bradshaw and the Emcee.
Characters underdeveloped
"Scottsboro" defendant Haywood Patterson, given a Paul Robeson-esque depiction by Joshua Henry, is the closest we come to a protagonist. Otherwise, these "Scottsboro" figures are remote and undeveloped; the "boys" age but do not otherwise grow in the show.
While I appreciate the challenge of making nine defendants fully realized in one theatrical evening, the "Scottsboro" characters could be far better distinguished, especially since some of the defendants were strangers to each other. We do not learn enough about the musical's cast to care deeply about them -- an anonymity that implies it is not important to get to know them. (One of the "Scottsboro" young men says at the end, "No one knows what happened to me." Really?)
If works that excavate our past are to be revelatory and transcendent, historical personages have to be filled out. We need to have some window into their roiled souls in order to understand them as humans as opposed to stick figures.
After seeing "Scottsboro," I felt like someone who had gone to visit a ransomed relative. You have to be nice to kidnappers holding your kin.
The claims on my feelings were made by the gifted cast, including versatile Colman Domingo as Mr. Bones, charismatic Forrest McClendon as Mr. Tambo and dignified Sharon Washington as a silent witness.
Still, their efforts remain captive to a loaded form.
A story like this merits a Sophoclean treatment, and should be rendered for what it is -- an epic tragedy. It's telling that the "Scottsboro" creative team believed that it needed a presentational filter -- and one that denies us empathy, that theatrical fundament -- to tell this story about the railroaded young men.
Many writers have countered entrenched archetypes and historical ciphers with complex human portraits. Playwright August Wilson's epic cycle, for example, is full of finely drawn individuals, including frustrated one-time baseball player Troy in "Fences" and God-challenging Herald Loomis in "Joe Turner's Come and Gone."
Novelist Toni Morrison's oeuvre is masterfully peopled by such distinct characters as Sula, the outcast and rebel regarded as evil by other members of her Ohio community; Pecola Breedlove, a girl who wants to be someone else so that her rough life would be easier in "The Bluest Eye," and runaway slave Sethe, who is haunted by the ghost of the child she killed to prevent her from having a life of captivity ("Beloved").
I wish that "Scottsboro" was as complete as any of these or even as the aforementioned masterworks by Kander and Ebb. The success of this new work could have made the team's historical trilogy a total triumph while also transforming a toxic episode into something affecting, even sublime. Sadly, this updated minstrel show, including an entirely gratuitous application of blackface, reduces these characters to caricature -- a result that mires the musical in the muck it seeks to master.
Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390
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THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS
What: Music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Book by David Thompson. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman.
When: 1 & 7 p.m. today and next Sun., 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1 p.m. & 7:30 p.m. Sat. Ends Sept. 25.
Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.
Tickets: $34-$65. 612-377-2224 orwww.guthrietheater.org.
>via: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/stageandarts/102585639.html?page=all...