DARKOLOGY

A comprehensive history of an ugly, long-running chapter of American history.

As Barnes, a historian at Princeton, describes it in this essential but painful-to-read work, the grotesque practice of blackface minstrelsy in America extends from “Jim Crow’s toothy grin in fraternal halls and civic centers” to its globalization through publishing empires, to the U.S. government casting it as “an emblem of uplift and American culture to be preserved and proselytized” during the Great Depression and beyond. Her immensely readable work covers more than a hundred years of white America’s embrace of this sordid form of entertainment. Among the organizations and prominent figures are Edwin P. Christy, who in 1846, in Buffalo, N.Y., formed the Christy Minstrels—“the world’s first enduring minstrel company”—and the Jolly Corks, a group founded in 1868 that became the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks (BPOE), which transformed minstrel shows into a “fundraising juggernaut,” became “a sanctuary for white male supremacy,” and maintained an enormous political influence well into the 20th century. Popular entertainers from Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Mickey Rooney to Shirley Temple and Doris Day donned blackface. Schools and churches staged productions. The ignominious history is frighteningly long, including Japanese Americans’ forced participation in minstrel shows—when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them into camps after Pearl Harbor—and the University of Vermont’s annual Kake Walk, in which, from 1893 to 1969, participants emulated the “Cakewalk”—“competitive dancing that enslaved men and women were forced to perform with fake joviality for white enslavers’ amusement.” Barnes also highlights heroic figures who fought to end the practice, from the NAACP to activist Betty Reid Soskin to musicians who created “the soundtrack to a revolution” by replacing minstrelsy and blackface “with authentic portrayals of Black life, Black beauty, and Black dignity,” with artists such as Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone leading the way.

An important and necessarily uncomfortable work on a disturbing legacy.