Well. You don’t get notices about minstrel shows every day. Especially not minstrel shows performed by high school students with the support and encouragement of their teachers and intended to promote multicultural sensitivity. This deserved more attention than a mere listing in the events calendar or even one on the Agenda page. I e-mailed the contact on the press release right away, a teacher named Harry Slater.
In addition to raising awareness, performing minstrel songs and dances would allow students to feel racism in their bodies.
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I called up Greg Laski, an English professor at the United States Air Force Academy. During my research, I’d come across a paper he’d written about Bamboozled, Spike Lee’s 2000 movie about a modern-day TV minstrel show. It also turned out that he’d been a PhD student at Northwestern during the school’s own embarrassing blackface incident (every year, there seems to be a new one somewhere), which inspired him to teach a course on the cultural history of the minstrel show. In his paper Laski had considered many of the same questions Slater had about minstrelsy and history, and we talked about them some more on the phone.
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The only way to find out would be to go to West Chicago and sit in on a rehearsal. I wrote to Slater and asked when I could come. And that’s when things started to get weird.
Minstrelsy lasted for a very long time, well into the civil rights era. You can still see it in movies from as late as the 1940s. The first minstrel number I ever saw was from the 1942 movie Holiday Inn, where Bing Crosby puts on blackface and sings “Abraham” to celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday. (I remember staring at the TV and thinking, Is this really happening?) If Mad Men is to be believed, it went on even longer; the excruciating Derby Day party scene where Roger Sterling croons “My Old Kentucky Home” in blackface takes place in 1963.
