Adirondack Blackface
CAUTION: This article quotes historical sources that used offensive language.
MAYBE YOU RECAL L THE NEWS ABOUT A racist blackface cartoon on the cover of a SUNY–Plattsburgh student newspaper in 2015. Or the SUNY–Potsdam students who filmed themselves cavorting to rap music in black facial masks. Unsettling incidents, followed swiftly by hurt and fury, apologies and solemn editorials. The proof of blackface’s unacceptability may be the lashing rage that greets it. Minus a few idiots, people do seem to get that this thing is just messed up.
What is much less understood is Adirondack blackface when it was the opposite of unacceptable. When it was absolutely everywhere. Not just in the bigger cities around the region, but in towns as small as Port Henry, Clintonville or Long Lake. And everybody did it. Schoolkids and women’s clubs, fraternal orders, firemen. Not, as college students do it now, for the thrill of messing with a stern taboo, but for comfort and community and love of a tradition whose essential racism went unheeded and entirely unchallenged.
But first, to the theft (or as the parlance has it now, the appropriation) that launched a thousand blackface revues. In the 1820s in Manhattan, a white actor, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, made a study of a brilliant dancer, a Black man, a stable hand. The man, never identified, was disabled, but the moves he made, both lurchy and elastic, syncopated, spry, turned his bad leg into an asset.
