NY Yankees In Blackface, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #172

May 30, 2010 Mike Gold 9 Comments

Friday afternoon. Linda and I were having lunch at a nearby bar. I was celebrating National Hamburger Day with one of the finest of truly American creations, the bar burger. Contrarian that she is, Linda ordered nachos. As we were waiting for our order, we were presented with our drinks: two Diet Cokes with lime. Being a bar, the Cokes were served in sports glasses – Linda’s celebrating the Mets, mine celebrating the Yankees. That’s ironic; in fact, I have never acknowledged the American League as a legitimate part of “Major League Baseball.”

I received my drink with the logo facing me. And after a quick glance, I started starting at it. I started at it so long Linda thought I entered a fugue state. She uttered “Ground Control To Major Mike!” and I snapped out of it. “What are you staring at?” she asked, ominously.

“This glass. The Yankees logo,” I replied.

“Why? What about it?” Linda responded trepidatiously.

“Minstrel. Do you think the logo has its roots in the minstrel shows?” I replied.

“Oh. I see your point,” she declared, declaratively. “I guess it’s possible.”

Both Linda and I study American cultural history and we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the minstrel show culture. Minstrel was the predominant form of American entertainment from the 1830s until cars and trucks made vaudeville competitive in years right before World War I. It remained popular for decades and minstrel shows were still mounted in the 1960s. In fact, minstrel acts abounded in television of the 1950s and 1960s, and was a frequent element in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In as late as 1973. The British enjoyed The Black and White Minstrel Show on stage and on television from 1958 to 1978.

At the core of minstrel is the culture of humiliation. Whereas that’s common to burlesque, the idea of getting a bunch of black people (initially, they were white folks in blackface and that trend was central to minstrel shows forever) and dressing them up in flamboyant formal wear and sundry costumes so they could sing and dance and gyrate around the plantation set is contemptible. One of the regular characters was a “black” Uncle Sam complete with the star-spangled high hat. It was prominently featured in minstrel advertising and in the sheet music that sold in the millions.

A lot of popular and important white entertainers such as Stephen Foster and Al Jolson were products of the minstrel show. In fact, the two most popular blackface performers – Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll – rarely appeared in blackface. They were better known as their character creations, Amos ‘n’ Andy. It was the biggest thing on radio and when it was ported over to television, Gosden and Correll finally hired an all-black cast.

Amos ‘n’ Andy was the first television series to have an all-black cast and one of the very few to feature blacks at all. The star of the show was the great Tim Moore, a man of enormous talent who was largely unknown to the white community despite his many successful years on Broadway and at the Apollo Theater. His co-star was Spencer Williams, an actor who was also known as one of the premier “race” movie directors – black cinema, as it’s called today. Several of his movies (The Blood of Jesus, Go Down Death, Beale Street Mama, Juke Joint) are usually aired each February.

The minstrel show also gave us immortal black performers such as W. C. Handy, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Rufus Thomas. Minstrel brought African music to white American awareness.

None of this is meant as a defense of that which is patently indefensible. The history of minstrel and its enduring popularity is fascinating nonetheless.

So, did the Yankees borrow this highly successful image? Maybe. It’s not like they’d confirm this (as Coca-Cola will not confirm the absolute fact that their product originally contained cocaine), and a casual search of the more reputable crannies of the Internet yielded no clue. The logo was adopted in 1936, a time when minstrel was still quite alive and blackface performers starred in movie comedies.

Symbology is a very, very potent force, and the influence need not be intentional. Black people were not allowed to play major league baseball in 1936 unless they were fortunate enough to be reclassified as “Cubans.” There were a lot of white boys on the field who were doing the work performed far better by men in the Negro Leagues. So even if the Uncle Sam hat was not a conscious reference to the minstrel shows, I think the irony is unavoidable.

Media metaphysician and www.ComicMix.comMike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.