Blog

By Pamilpreet Brar, Josiah McColeman, and Faryn Smith

In 1996, the Fergus Brass Band performed a blackface minstrel show at the Fergus High School. While it may seem like blackface and minstrelsy are forms of entertainment of a different time, the minstrel show, the donning of blackface, and its residual effects continue to remain pervasive in society today.

Minstrelsy, What is it?

Minstrelsy is the comic enactment of Black stereotypes usually performed in blackface. The minstrel show was derived from the character commonly known as “Jim Crow,” which is closely tied to American system of laws of racial segregation. He was created in 1828 by Thomas D. Rice, the son of English immigrants, who lived in the lower east side of Manhattan (“The Origins of the Black Minstrel show” 45). Rice was the first person to go on stage with black cork smeared on his face and go by the name of “Jim Crow.” Previously, other actors had appeared in blackface portraying the stereotypical role under names like “Black Sambo,” but Rice’s “Jim Crow” was an African-American trickster masquerading in the guise of an escaped slave. The audience for his sarcasm and wit was working-class whites, who faced a different form of hardship (45).

While minstrel shows began in the United States, this practice of Black “recreation” was evident in Canadian society. While Canada is often perceived as a “racism-free space,” a haven for fugitive slaves who escaped North via the Underground Railroad, Canada is more similar to its neighbours in the south than it would like to admit. American minstrel companies first came to Canada in the 1840s, but its peak years were between the 1860s and 1910s (Thompson 100). One of the first cultural events of the Northwest Mounted Police was a minstrel show. The minstrel production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the most popular shows that toured across Canada. The degradation and dehumanization of Black lives, evident in minstrel advertisements, was the cultural reality or dominant perspective of blackness in Canada at the time (Thompson 99-103).

Troubling Guelph and Canada’s “Racism-Free” Identity

Evidence of the minstrel tradition in the Wellington County Museum, Guelph Civic Museum, and the University of Guelph Library document a long history of a white community’s engagement with racist tropes and caricatures of Black people and culture. The following examples of local manifestations of bigotry and ignorance figure blackface minstrelsy as an important aspect of white culture in Guelph and surrounding areas. This archive of blackface and minstrelsy depict a century of white engagement with and enjoyment of racist representations of minoritized people. These photographs trouble the concept of Guelph, and Canada more generally, as a “racism-free space.”

The first image shows the Guelph Jazz Band on the steps of Guelph City Hall in 1921. This image is disturbing due to its placement of the photo. By being taken in the steps of City Hall it associated people of political power in Guelph with this racist engagement.

The second image is from 1925 and shows the Ladies of Chalmers Choir at Castle Theatre engaging in a minstrel play for the entertainment of a white audience. Despite being a marginalized group themselves, these women put forth a minstrel production meant to degrade Black people.

The third image is from 1950 and shows community members from Belwood United Church dressed in blackface for an amateur production. Being associated with a church, this play connects religion and racism during the 20th century in Canada and the church’s role in promoting the degradation of Black people and culture in the Guelph area.

The fourth image is a 1961 advertisement form the minstrel show performed by the Guelph Kiwanis Club, their 10th annual minstrel production. By the Kiwanis Club being able to produce and find profit in ten consecutive years of amateur minstrel productions show that the citizens of Guelph accepted and enjoyed this racist production of the characterization of Black people.  

Finally, the opening image in this blog post is from a 1996 minstrel production by the Fergus Brass Band performed at the Fergus High School and demonstrates the continued presence of blackface in Wellington County. Over the 140 years of its existence, the Fergus Brand Band performed in racial costumes; black and white photographs of the band, in the Wellington County Museum and Archive, show members dressed in “Chinese costume” (1950), “First Nations costumes” (1955), and “Arab costumes” (1970).

Why does this Matter Today?

By remembering minstrel shows, we can assess how this popular form of entertainment fuelled anti-Black sentiment in Canada. As early as July 1840, forty-five Black people from Toronto asked for the banning of Blackface performances. They did this because they saw its purpose was to “make the Coloured man appear ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of their audience” (Frost). This early opposition emphasizes the erasure of Blackness, it must be noted while Blackface is remembered, the protests against it are overlooked. Another method of contesting this racist theatre was through the creation of  whiteface. Bob Cole, a Black performer, challenged societal norms by creating the white character of Willie Wayside; as the red-headed Wayside, Cole intended to highlight the versatility of Black actors in comedy (McAllister 3). This method of critiquing racial hierarchies did not stop the practice, but challenged it nonetheless. To truly understand the “absent-presence” of Blacks in Canada, there must be an examination of the ways cultural representations of blackness have shaped the ways we understand and limit the meaning and significance of Black people in Canada and beyond.

By Laila El Mugammar, Maggie Lehman, and Maxime Tam 

WHAT IS BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY? 

Blackface minstrelsy is an attempt to impersonate another race and present it as a form of entertainment. It involves individuals (most often people who identify as white) who paint their faces black and perform a series of musical and dance numbers that “ventriloquize” blackness. These performances are comic theatricalization of degrading and demeaning stereotypes invented by white people that is meant to denigrate and erase the history and experiences of Black people. 

Developed during the early nineteenth century and gaining immense popularity all the way through the mid-twentieth century, blackface minstrelsy in North America emerged as a “conduit of white assertion and a buffer against black protest” (Douglas 27). On the one hand, early minstrel shows allowed white people a platform to express their dissatisfaction with a rapidly changing economy that further alienated and disenfranchised the working class working in industrial factories, but on the other, it also gave whites, of all classes, an opportunity to suppress abolitionist movements attempts to end chattel slavery in the US South (31). The rise and success of blackface minstrelsy suggests that white Americans were afraid of what would happen to their white privilege and power should Black people achieve equal opportunity and fair treatment. Blackface minstrelsy ultimately fueled pro-slavery politics and anti-Black sentiments that ridiculed the idea of Black freedom and citizenship.  

It is important to understand that while blackface minstrelsy is commonly associated with the United States and the US South, Canada has a long history of promoting and performing, engaging and watching blackface minstrelsy. Calixa Lavallée, the composer of our Canadian national anthem, spent many years of his career as a composer and musical director for a travelling minstrel performance group, the New Orleans Minstrels (Thompson 23). Consider what it means to have Lavallée as a representative figure of/for Canada with his participation and contribution in minstrel shows, especially as we delve deeper into the history and current relevance of blackface minstrelsy not only in Canada on a broader scale, but also in the City of Guelph. 

BLACKFACE MINSTREL SHOWS IN GUELPH AND WELLINGTON COUNTY

Blackface minstrelsy served an important social function in the lives of Guelphites: it was a form of entertainment, and like most media, it reaffirmed existing disparities and systems of oppression. The Ontario Agricultural College hosted a number of minstrel shows. One, which took place in March of 1912, is described in the OAC Review as taking the audience back to the “Dear Old South.” It boasted “Southern jokes and songs […] rendered in first class style” and a sketch entitled “Befo’ de War” (Miller 321). The December 1943 OAC Review delineates a minstrel show in which the chorus sang “Old Black Joe” and “Darktown Strutters Ball.” They also sang “Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy and perhaps the most famous song born of blackface minstrelsy. The Kiwanis Club of Guelph, which was founded in 1921 and professes to be “working for the betterment of our community and our world,” held annual minstrel shows in the auditorium of Guelph Collegiate and Vocational School. An advert for the 1961 minstrel is shown below: 

Pictured above is the Guelph Jazz Band (circa 1927) standing on the steps of City Hall in blackface. Blackness was and is an absented presence in Guelph, and the mythology of Canada as an egalitarian refuge for Black people escaping the horrors of slavery is an obstacle to confronting a legacy of anti-Black racism. The erasure of Canada’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade allowed us to shamelessly indulge in this form of anti-Black entertainment and deny its relevance to our own relationship with blacks in Canada, past and present. Minstrelsy was a cultural import, and this lack of responsibility for its origins ensured no Canadian individual or group needed to be accountable for enjoying it. Blackness and Black people being “always elsewhere” created fertile soil for blackface minstrelsy to flourish in Guelph. 

THE RELEVANCE OF BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY TODAY

Guelph is like many other cities within southwestern Ontario that have erased or forgotten their long tradition of hosting and performing blackface minstrel shows. However, the legacies of blackface minstrelsy in Ontario are constantly rupturing our present-day amnesia. In recent years, there have been many examples that shed light on how this popular form of entertainment continues to influence (and damage) understandings of race and race relations today. For example, a CBC News report from January 4, 2018, entitled “London police officer apologizes for blackface incident,” describes an apology letter written by a London police officer, who was photographed in neck coils, tribal clothing and brown face makeup for a Halloween event.  While not a police officer at the time the photographs were taken, the London Police understood the implications of the officer’s participation in degrading and demeaning representations of black people as affirming a widely held belief of racial bias in police shootings and crime rates.

To further emphasize the relevance of minstrelsy in contemporary society, Philip S.S. Howard argues in “Blackface in Canada” that although “there appears, in some ways, to have been a resurgence of these [minstrel] acts in the last 10-15 years, it cannot trill be said that blackface ever entirely lost popularity here in the interim.” In his conclusion, Howard argues that while contemporary incidents of blackface “spark intense debate,” there are many attempts “to justify it as harmless fun, and in some cases suggesting that those who are offended by it are ‘too sensitive’ or bound by unwarranted ‘political correctness.'” However, contemporary blackface continues to draw on the tropes and traditions of the minstrel show, reiterating stereotypes of Black inferiority and ideas of white racial supremacy that are more ingrained — and dangerous — than we realize.