Last week – prompted by the white-politicians-in-blackface photo eruption in Virginia – my husband and I, like millions of other Americans around the country, went to the attic, rummaged through our old yearbooks and breathed sighs of relief.
There were no snapshots of white people wearing blackface in any one of them.
This particularly reassured me since I had in fact been the editor of one, the 1958 Paragon from North Royalton High School in northeastern Ohio.
Not, mind you, that there weren’t a lot of other photos that were – viewed from the sophisticated heights of 2019 – painfully embarrassing or laughable or both. I guess it’s inevitable that yearbooks, as annual productions, are almost uniquely positioned to reflect the fashions and fads of the day.
In the case of that Paragon, for both the fashionable and unfashionable sets captured in the pics and prose, hairstyles meant flattops and DAs for the boys and neat perms for the girls. Girls also wore tidy sweater sets and slim skirts – no slacks! – while boys stuck with khaki pants and white or plaid shirts. The grads were all white, reflecting the small town’s population.
And, unlike the apparent practice in Virginia, not one wore blackface.
Nor did they in the 1958 Distaff from my husband’s alma mater, Sanford High School in Maine.
For that matter, there was definitely no blackface in my small women’s college’s 1962 Vista or my husband’s hefty 1962 Howitzer from (where else?) the United States Military Academy.
And it wasn’t just a northern aversion to the odious minstrel tradition – which was a hoary and horrid relic even back in our long-ago days – of white folks slathering their skin with burnt cork or black shoe polish and performing degrading “darkie” routines mocking black folks for the amusement of other white folks.
I checked with my friend Laura, who spent her formative years in a small town in the southeast corner of Missouri, hardly a hotbed of liberalism. Yeah, they had yearbooks. But no photos of grinning white people in blackface in them.
And I should say that Laura is not as old as I am but she is, well, not young. She didn’t grow up in a truly enlightened Missouri – but it was enlightened enough to know that blackface was no longer socially acceptable.
That’s apparently not the case in more recent Virginia, where bipartisan nincompoopery reigned.
The governor and the attorney general – both Democrats – owned up to appearing in public in the 1980s with blackened faces – in the governor’s case, the color came from black shoe polish, which the governor helpfully told reporters was really hard to remove, as if that’s some sort of atonement.
And sleuths quickly discovered that the powerful head of the state senate – a Republican – was the managing editor of a yearbook that was rife with racist references as well as yet more white people in blackface.
This isn’t part of ancient history, but relatively recent. Nor did it reflect the heedless stupidity of youth. In the case of the blackface-wearing governor in particular, he was in medical school – a real grownup, not a crass teenager.
It was a reminder that the Old Dominion state has a long and important but troubled history – particularly as a major player in the slave-owning Confederacy, a legacy it has to live with today, 400 years after the first 19 or 20 – accounts vary – Africans were brought to the state’s shores in 1619.
And yes, they were enslaved people – human beings in shackles, sold to the highest bidder, not “indentured servants,” as the governor maladroitly described them to a reporter.
They had been ripped from their homes and families and carried across an ocean in life-threatening conditions to become, literally, chattel – “items of property other than real estate” – to be used and abused by their purchasers, a status they held for more than 250 years.
And even after they were technically freed – first by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and a horrific civil war, then by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution – they were effectively kept in servitude by a system of Jim Crow laws that only the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s began to dismantle.
Virginia was a powerful upholder of those Jim Crow laws, which are part of its and this country’s sad history.
That history – that of African Americans and their place in our country’s history for 400 years – is a big part of an important and acclaimed new institution in Montgomery, Ala., the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and its Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
In a piece written for last Sunday’s Monitor, Concord educator Chali Davis movingly described her visit to the new landmarks which, as she said, “seek to remember and honor” African Americans’ history, “while reminding America that slavery did not end in 1865; it merely reinvented itself through segregation, racial terrorism and mass incarceration – poisons that continue to pollute our society today.”
It was a long and thoughtful essay discussing history and ideas important to all Americans. And the first comment on her words by one of the paper’s ubiquitous commenters? A snide, semi-coherent diatribe that her obviously heartfelt words were nothing but a plot by an all-powerful cabal at the Monitor to detract attention from “Democratic racism” in Virginia.
So to be perfectly clear: While hardly in the same category as “slavery … segregation, racial terrorism and mass incarceration,” the spectacle of white people donning blackface for entertainment has no place anywhere in America in 2019.
Particularly not in Black History Month.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)