"Unmasking" Minstrelsy with Loeb Library's New Exhibit

“There have been two ways to look at things like minstrelsy. One way is to say: ‘Let’s forget it and look forward,’ and the other way is to say: ‘We will never forget,’” Louis Chude-Sokei said at the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library on Jan 26. Author of “The Last 'Darky': Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora,” Chude-Sokei was the keynote speaker at the opening of the exhibit “Unmasking Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in American Pop Culture.” Consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, blackface minstrelsy was hugely popular in 19th-century America and was viewed as one of the first US cultural exports, spreading to Australia, France, South Africa, and even China. Today, however, minstrelsy is largely ignored as an embarrassing and inconvenient page of American history.

Last semester, Carol J. Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music, and Samuel J. Parler, Ph.D candidate in Music, started a seminar entitled “Blackface Minstrelsy in 19th Century America” to explore the history and legacy of blackface performance. The class culminated in the student-curated exhibit “Unmasking Jim Crow,” currently on display Jan. 26 through May 8 on the second floor of the Loeb Music Library. The exhibit includes images, sheet music, songsters, and other artifacts from the Harvard Theater Collection, which has one of the most important compilations of 19th century minstrelsy materials in the world.

At the opening symposium, Chude-Sokei and Rhiannon Giddens, banjoist and vocalist of Grammy award-winning old-time string band “The Carolina Chocolate Drops,” shared their understanding of minstrelsy. Chude-Sokei discussed the role that minstrelsy played in legitimizing slavery and shaping the stereotype of black people around the world. Yet, as he explained, minstrel shows later became very popular among African Americans and had an influx of black performers after the Civil War. “For black [performers] who did it, it was their way to have access to the stage of performance,” Chude-Sokei said. “It was them trying to prove they could [also perform minstrelsy] because it was so popular and it was celebrated as a great important international thing. So black people wanted to show that ‘we can do it too’, which sounds bizarre.” He emphasized that the audience has to understand minstrelsy in its historical context. “Even though we think of it as a racist performance, back then many black people liked it. They thought it was funny...because they were like, ‘Look at how stupid white people made themselves look.’”

Giddens talked about the huge influence that historical musicologists, including Chude-Sokei, had on her and her work and the collaboration between scholars and performers in spreading the awareness of black history. “After I read the books that these scholars have written, I can then perform for somebody who probably would never read the book and give them a little bit information about this,” she said. “So it does take everybody to get the information out there and to get this music and this part of history.”

For students in the seminar, the study was rewarding and refreshing. Grace Edgar, Ph.D candidate in Historical Musicology, thinks it is important to examine minstrelsy because a lot of its influence and stereotypes survive in this age. “Especially today, with the Ferguson issue, we need to think about the image that we have produced,” she said.

“Unmasking Jim Crow” is ultimately the culmination of the lessons discovered in Oja’s and Parler’s seminar—one that will continue to advocate deeper perspectives. “[The seminar] has turned out even better than I could imagine,” Parler said. “Teaching the class, we’ve had a really great opportunity to get collections in the library. I think all students have really learned a lot and are now thinking about [minstrelsy] in their own way.”