In the early 20th century, Hollywood studios used the popularity of blackface to draw a mass audience to the new medium of film. After World War II, even as the civil rights movement emerged, blackface remained a staple of cartoons , community theater , toys, household decorations and corporate branding.
Since its emergence in the s in the taverns and on the theater stages of New York and other northern cities — it originated in the North , not the slave South — blackface has involved the vicious ridiculing of people of African descent. White men blacked up by smearing burnt cork on their faces.
They exaggerated their red lips and wore outlandish costumes, portraying character types like the raggedly slave, dubbed Jim Crow , or the ostentatious but simpleminded dandy, Zip Coon.
Minstrel shows consisted of jokes and clowning skits. The blackface characters mispronounced words and acted like bumpkins. They sang songs, sometimes sentimental and sometimes randy. Blackface turned prejudice into profit. Blackface offered the perfect entertainment for a slave nation and then, after the Civil War, a society built on racial segregation. Popular American actors, including Shirley Temple, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney donned blackface, bridging the minstrel performance across generations, and making blackface racial parody, and stereotypes a family amusement.
Blackface and the codifying of blackness— language, movement, deportment, and character—as caricature persists through mass media and in public performances today.
In each instance, those facing scrutiny for blackface performances insist no malice or racial hatred was intended. Privacy Terms of Use. Skip to main content. Billy Van, the monologue comedian, Caselli and Jonathan Mark Scharer. More recently, outrage ensued when Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and the state attorney general Mark Herring both admitted in February to wearing blackface costumes as young men.
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Ralph Northam's personal page in his medical school yearbook. It depicts one person in blackface and another dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
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