 |
 n Bamboozled, a television writer reinvents the black-face minstrel show as a 21st century network hit. In reality, television's first real view of African-Americans came from that same minstrel tradition. It was 1951 when two black actors became television's first African American stars in "The Amos and Andy Show," which actually began as a radio show -- with two white actors playing a pair of comically uneducated southern black men. "Amos and Andy" was America's highest-rated radio show and became equally popular on television - without ever altering its crudely racist content.
"Amos and Andy" arose out of an even earlier tradition of stereotypical entertainment that started in the 19th century: the minstrel show. The tradition began in the early 1800s on stage, with white actors using burnt corks to darken their skin - a method that became known as "black-face" - allowing them to portray African-American slaves, usually as lazy, child-like providers of comic relief. This evolved into Vaudeville-style parody shows consisting of songs, dances and comic repartee performed by white actors made up as blacks.
The father of the American minstrel show was Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, who in the 1830s drew immense popularity with a song-and-dance routine in which he impersonated an old, crippled black slave named Jim Crow. In New York City, the act of "Tambo and Bones" was one of the Manhattan stage's biggest draws. These shows introduced some of Africa's musical instruments - especially the banjo - to white audiences for the first time.
After the Civil War, black entertainers themselves began to enter the tradition -- appearing in black-face makeup themselves and forming their own minstrel theatres - taking with them the caricatures and stereotypes created by the white performers. Perhaps the first major black minstrel success was Brooker and Clayton's Georgia Minstrels, who hailed themselves in their advertising as "The Only Simon Pure Negro Troupe in the World." In 1876, the black group known as Callendar's Minstrels broke the mold, and became the first African-American minstrel band to perform without black-face.
Although the minstrel shows began to decline at the turn of the century, the tradition was continued in the newfangled entertainment forms of movies and radio. Early silent films continued to cast white actors in black-face as shiftless, lazy, comical characters. One of the most popular characters of the silent film era became the "Uncle Tom," a head-scratching old black man portrayed by white actors in such films as For Massa's Sake, Ten Pickaninnies and The Wooing and Wedding of A Coon. Other popular film stereotypes included the big, waddling black woman, often known as Mammy, who chased her man with a cast-iron skillets; and the chicken-stealing, shifty-eyed black hooligan, frequently named Rufus or Rastus. One of the most shocking examples of black-face in the silent era came in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, in which cinema's largest early audiences were subjected to vivid images of white actors in black faces raping, stealing and threatening the people of the South.
The "Talkies" saw the rise of Stepin Fetchit, a black comic named Lincoln Perry who became Hollywood's first major African-American star, joining the ranks of other early film millionaires. Stepin Fetchit's brilliant comic timing won the admiration of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin among others, but he was also criticized for perpetuating the stereotyped images of the day, playing what became known as "the laziest human being in the world." His films included Hearts of Dixie, The Galloping Ghost and Helldorado - and Stepin Fetchit often received top billing with white actors.
During the 1940s, Mantan Moreland (the inspiration for Savion Glover's character Mantan on the New Milliennial Minstrel Show") became one of America's top black stars. Although he starred in several of the era's black-directed "race" movies - which were shown to segregated audiences in major urban centers - he became best known for his portrait of the wide-eyed, scared-to-death chauffeur, Birmingham Brown, in the Charlie Chan movies.
It took decades for the scope of black life on film to begin to expand, but at the same time the rise of television provided a new outlet for images of African-Americans. Following a cry of outrage over "Amos N Andy," the networks handled the controversy by staying away, rarely creating black-themed shows for several decades. Black television shows resurged in the 70s with such hits as "The Jeffersons," "Benson," "Diff'rent Strokes" and "Good Times" - but the one-dimensional and sometimes degrading comedy caused another backlash, with sit-coms showcasing upper-middle class African Americans like "The Cosby Show" taking off.
Today, in a world of some 900 channels all competing for media-hungry audiences, diversity remains an unattained ideal. Some media scholars posit that urban talk shows - which often present troubled minorities for public consumption - are a direct descendent of minstrel stereotypes. Others point to the detrimental depictions of African-American characters in currently-running sitcoms as signs that the minstrel show continues to exert its influence. And, like poor Pierre Delacroix, lots of people have been looking for a change.
|
|
