If we take a step back from the individual cases of Virginia leaders Ralph Northam and Mark Herring, what’s more than a little astonishing and revolting is the persistence of blackface as an apparently normal form of dress-up as recently at the 1980s in some quadrants of American culture. This isn’t to exculpate Northam and Herring, but rather to note how much of that which is presumably dead lives on in multiple corners of our far-flung nation.
Blackface was at the center of mainstream popular entertainment in America through much of the 19th century, beginning with minstrel shows and then moving on into any number of vaudeville acts and silent pictures. For some of the stars of the annual Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway in the 1900s, 1910s and into the 1920s, for Al Jolson and occasionally Eddie Cantor, appearing in blackface was part of their shtick. The great African American comic Bert Williams, who also starred in the Follies as well as in his own shows, also wore blackface—it wasn’t enough, apparently, to be actually black. By the time of the Follies, however, blackface had become far less a national norm in popular entertainment than it had been 30 years previous. In popular consciousness, it was chiefly Jolson who kept it alive, not least through his role in the first breakthrough talking picture, 1927’s The Jazz Singer. Nineteen years later, when Columbia Pictures released a Jolson biopic—The Jolson Story—blackface (at least to Hollywood and Broadway) had become an element of period re-creations of an older culture. Its aural equivalent—the hugely popular Amos and Andy radio show of the 1920s and 1930s, in which white actors wrote and performed the roles of horrendously stereotyped blacks—also died out by the 1950s (though for a time, there was an Amos and Andy TV sitcom in which black actors took the leading roles).
One medium in which blackface had a somewhat longer run was parades, most notably Philadelphia's yearly Mummers' Parade, featuring whites in presumably comic garb and blackface. As the civil rights movement surged, parade organizers realized they'd have to drop the blackface, and the Mummers officially abandoned blackface in 1964. However, parade entrants in blackface have continued to pop up ever since.
And now, we discover that in the frat boy—or even the non-frat boy—culture of Virginia universities, and who knows what other colleges, universities and high schools, blacking up was, if no longer widespread, at least widespread enough to be unremarkable as late as the 1980s, and, we're also discovering, thereafter, too. We all know (or should know) that white racism is America's most hardy perennial, but it is still somewhat surprising to find that a white racist entertainment meme that went out of fashion nearly a century ago was still popping up in the 1980s, and was by no means confined to segregationists, Klansmen, and Nazis.
What a country.
