The Contradictions of Minstrelsy: Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Gumbo Chaff

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses refer either to stanzas in “Jim Crow” or to lines in “Zip Coon,” and “Gumbo Chaff.”  The poems are appended. 

 

      The minstrel show was a leading form of American popular entertainment for decades.  What had been enjoyed as simple entertainment lost its savor when the form was eventually recognized as aggressively and perniciously racist.  Already in its heyday Frederick Douglass denounced minstrelsy with righteous anger, castigating the performers as “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.” [1] 

     Douglass’ unqualified condemnation, while justifiable in a polemic, is reductive.   His disgusted rejection of minstrel entertainment contrasts dramatically with the attitude of W. E. B. Du Bois whose defense of the contributions of Black artists included “American music built on Negro themes . . . such as ‘Old Black Joe’” as well as praising James Weldon Johnson and composer Will Marion Cook whose works were, doubtless for commercial considerations, sometimes clearly derivative of minstrelsy. [2]  The penetration of minstrelsy to the most sophisticated Black artists is evident in Cook and Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s operetta Clorindy: the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898) which was heavily influenced by the genre’s conventions and included songs like "Who Dat Say Chicken In Dis Crowd" and “Hottest Coon in Dixie.”

     In their time minstrel shows were nationwide popular culture in a young nation, and were valued by many as a sort of unique national culture.  For some sympathetic to Black culture, far from being degrading, minstrel entertainments allowed music arising from African-American culture to become popular and “cross over” to a wider audience.  Since “negroes” were “the true originators of this music,” its performance might allow the race to “aspire to an equality with the musical and poetical delineators of all nationalities.” [3]  A popular music magazine in 1856 lamented the lack of musicality of many white Americans, noting that “we are still dependent on foreigners [Italians and Germans] for our music,” since “the only musical population of this country are the negroes of the south.”  “Compared with our taciturn race, the African nature is full of poetry and song. The Negro is a natural musician.”  The apparent praise arises, however, from a Romantic and racist premise: “the African nature is full of poetry. Inferior to the white race in reason and intellect, they have more imagination.” [4]

     A similar ambivalence is reflected in a comprehensive and detailed survey of Black performance in America published in 1889 which noted that that minstrelsy was “the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly, it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music.”  The qualifying phrase questions whether Black art can be art at all, while at the same time it concedes the quality and distinctly American character of performances developed from African-American materials. [5]

     The historical context confirms the ambiguity of what today seems an outrightly offensive art.  Minstrelsy began in New York City and its leading performers were virtually all Northerners and no defenders of slavery.  Performers like Thomas “Daddy” Rice claimed to be imitating valued Black models.  As an actor Rice sometimes played Uncle Tom in blackface in the extremely popular enactments of the novel which served as propaganda for the anti-slavery cause.  Dan Emmett, the founder of the first troupe of minstrel performers, was from frontier Ohio.  He, too, was an opponent of slavery and reportedly regretted having written his biggest hit “Dixie” when the South made it an anthem (Lincoln was very fond of the song as well).  [6]  Though his dialect songs no longer find listeners, Henry Work Clay in “Kingdom Coming” expressed rebellion against master and overseer and celebrated liberation (“ De whip is lost, de han'cuff broken”) in his work while in his life he maintained an Underground Railway stop.      

     Recent studies have argued for the complexity of the theatrical phenomenon.  A recent popular account claims that minstrel shows expressed a progressive point of view and attracted a multi-racial audience specifically because they “embodied the strivings and frustrations of laborers of all races and circumstances who were wise to their oppressive masters.”  In this writer’s view the blackface character is a “compellingly transgressive cross-racial persona, with its slyly veiled but unmistakable challenge to power.”  [7]  A scholarly treatment elides race while suggesting that minstrelsy was progressive.  The shows “represented, in a comic way, the natural and democratic values usually fostered by the Indian, the Yankee, or the frontiersman against artificiality and elitism.” [8]  Calling the minstrel form “shot through with ambivalence,” another academic study raises the possibility that blackface manifested a genuine “African-American people’s culture,” [9] while yet another notes that in general early “minstrels deplored the cruelty of slavery.” [10]

     Ambivalence emerges inevitably from the blackface tradition.  While the comic figures of the minstrel stage were portrayed as buffoons (a fate common to many comic characters), their antics accompanied the movement of music based in part on Black models to the center of popular taste, a dominance now globalized with the influence of blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues.  In this way the rise of minstrelsy might, like the prominence of Gnaoua musicians in Morocco, be viewed as a result of West African musical genius.  The fact remains that the minstrel stage constructed and perpetuated negative racial stereotypes which, while likely reassuring to the white audience, were socially destructive.  Despite this general effect, the songs and skits could sometimes express authentic aspirations of African-Americans while satirizing the master class.  Some minstrel comedy is embodied in projections of desire which apply to all people. 

     The polyvalence of what might seem on the surface a simple and unambiguous set of conventions is in fact inherent in its essence.  A masquerade in which a white person aped a Black (reminiscent of African masquerades and forgotten European ones) was capable of further turns.  Soon Black performers were imitating white ones imitating Black ones.  Once the African-American with the stage name of Juba (William Henry Lane) became sufficiently celebrated (in part through Dickens’ description of him in American Notes) to attract imitators, a viewer witnessing their derivative shows could see a white man pretending to be a Black imitating a white person in the role of a Black one.   The vertigo of such a situation is unsettling and clearly problematic.

     The original texts of the classic minstrel characters provide a body of evidence more direct and revealing than theoretical speculation or circumstantial historical investigation.  Among the most celebrated of the early minstrel characters were Jim Crow, originated by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, Zip Coon, performed by George Washington Dixon, and Gumbo Chaff, performed by both Rice and Dixon.  An examination of the songs attributed to each of these contributes to an understanding of the racial attitudes of the performers and their audiences.   

     The Jim Crow spectacle doubtless centered on the dancing which was surely expert but also exotic, and likely a bit grotesque.  Rice’s model was a disabled man whose performance entertained people in the same way as kings had once been amused at dwarfs.  The improbable makeup must have had a comic impact like Groucho Marx’s mustache when it was painted on, or Chaplin’s villains’ towering eyebrows.  These significant elements are lost.  The character of Jim Crow underwent considerable reuse and adaptation on the minstrel stage and beyond, but the present analysis, like those that follow, is based on the text of the original poem alone.

     Jim Crow appears in Rice’s song fundamentally as a hero, a man of prodigious abilities and appetites, a fighter and a lover.  With physical strength sufficient to “split a horse block” (13) he is “full of fight” (5).  The song concludes with an aggressive challenge to racists.

 

An I caution all white dandies,

Not to come in my way,

For if dey insult me,

dey'll in de gutter lay.     (44)

 

     Like Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Lancelot, Jim Crow is a lover as well.  He cannot stay away from the river due to the many “galls” there.  He admires women in Hoboken, too, where he sees them “drinking lemonade.” (26)  He is enthusiastic about marriage and looks down on divorce, imagining himself proudly strolling down Broadway with his wife on his arm. (40-42)  This final image is in a way definitive: what Jim Crow wants is respect.

     The song, however, is comic, enlivened by carnival spirit including the sort of fanciful boasts characteristic of the tall tales associated with the frontier.  Just as Davy Crockett was said to claim to be able to “whip my weight in wildcats” [11], Jim Crow boasts, “I wip my weight in wildcats.” (7)  Crockett claims to be “half alligator,” while Jim Crow says he could “eat an Alligator.” (7)  With similar verbal display Jim Crow’s fighting prowess leaves one opponent nothing but “a little grease spot” (6) while another turns gray with fright. (14)

     When Jim Crow comes to comment directly on politics, the views expressed are direct and uncompromising.  The singer contemplates emancipation, declaring that the slaves’ “wish for freedom” is “shining in deir eyes” and boldly stating an abolitionist position.

 

I'm for freedom,

An for Union altogether,

Aldough I'm a black man,

De white is call'd my broder.

                                          (39)

 Rice’s Jim Crow even goes into the political details of the time, noting the challenge to the federal government in South Carolina’s Nullification Act of 1832 and anticipating the Civil War.

 

De great Nullification,

And fuss in de South,

Is now before Congress,

To be tried by word ob mouth.

(34)

 

Dey hab had no blows yet,

And I hope dey nebber will,

For its berry cruel in bredren

One anoders blood to spill.

(35)

 

     In spite of the obvious insulting racial stereotypes implied by the makeup, the dialect, and the doubtlessly weird dance movements, Jim Crow as a character seems more a comically exaggerated frontier hero like Davy Crockett or Mike Fink than weak and simply ridiculous like the movies’ Lincoln Perry (Stepin Fetchit) or Willie Best.  

     Zip Coon is likewise a comic figure, boastful in spite of his uneducated language; though he claims to be a “larned skoler,” (1) though the reader suspects his deepest learning concerns the pursuit of the “possum up a gum tree” or the “coony on a stump.” (5) His love with Suky, though rustic, is mutual.  The frivolous tone of the song with its effervescent nonsense syllables is inescapable, but Zip Coon, like Jim Crow, has a partisan political position.  Like Andrew Jackson and many of the country’s working class, he opposes the United States Bank, but his next line is a startling one: “de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon.” (32)  He then tops this declaration by naming Davy Crockett, who was found to have a good deal in common with Jim Crow, as vice-president. (47)  Zip Coon, far from accepting the status quo, clearly advocates grass roots rebellion.  He is appetitive and boastful, but these are the characteristics of heroes as well as fools.

     “Gumbo Chaff,” another character Rice popularized with a song and dance, while he begins in slavery, ends in bourgeois propriety, introducing his wife to neighbors.  A riverboat man skilled at cat-fishing, he is nonetheless mistreated by his master whose death then appears a matter of retributive justice. [12]  He has little doubt of the slaveowner’s posthumous fate.

 

An' I do believe sure enough he's gone to de debil,

For when he live you know he light upon me so,

But now he's gone to tote de firewood way down below. (22-4)

 

     The deceased master’s wife seems to have troubles of her own including an acquisitive new lover whose exploitation of her wealth is the occasion for another sympathetic reference to Davy Crockett. (28)  Perhaps she also exercises less control over the slaves, for Gumbo Chaff runs off to New Orleans where he astonishes the locals with his “genius” at handling cotton bales: “dey swore it was de debil or old Gumbo Chaff.” (42)  In this free environment he flourishes, dancing and learning French, until he stows away for a return upriver to a satisfied retirement where he recounts his career for the amusement of “white folks,” a task he accomplishes by the very act of speaking of it. (63)

     Far from finding contentment in slavery, Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Gumbo Chaff all express the desire to escape their oppression.  In the first and last instances they achieve a respectable married life and in the second (in imagination, at any rate) the presidency of the United States.  The comic attributes of all three are in part the appetitive proclivities often prominent in comedy magnified by the exaggerations of “tall tale” lore.  Yet Douglass had good reason to complain that minstrel performers “pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens,” “corrupt” because they direct laughter at African-Americans as they coopt their skin color and thus reinforce the racism that has poisoned this republic since its founding.  Minstrelsy as a Creolized art, a mixture of European and African elements, was perhaps bound from its conception to a profound ambivalence.  

      The white working-class audience that patronized early minstrel shows, like the white working class in other eras, was able to scapegoat and mock African-American workers, while periodically recognizing their common humanity.  This vacillation was inevitably represented in popular entertainments during and after the practice of the country’s “peculiar institution.”  While some members of a white audience  might seek to elevate their own exploited position prior to the rise of labor unions by scorning identifiable groups of their fellow workers, women or immigrants if not non-white peoples, this reaction was neither necessary nor consistent.  White workers sometimes also extended a general human sympathy with slaves and Blacks, often in the popular sentimental mode of the day, and sometimes made common political cause with them on the basis of class.  The same ambivalence, unfortunately, is no less apparent in twenty-first century America.  Condemning the racism that clearly plays a role in minstrel entertainments need not involve blindness to the progressive tendencies of such performances and of the artists who composed them. 

 

  

 

1.  “The Hutchinson Family.—Hunkerism,” The North Star, October 27, 1848.  Douglass recommended instead the Hutchinson Family, a group of white singers who actively supported opposition to slavery as well as other progressive causes such as woman suffrage, opposition to the Mexican War, and Prohibition. 

 

2.  W. E. Burghardt DuBois, “The Negro in Literature and Art,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Sep., 1913, Vol. 49, The Negro's Progress in Fifty Years (Sep., 1913).  Cook had studied in Heinrich Jacobson in Germany and in America with Dvořák.  He directed an operatic version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1898.

 

3.  “The Black Opera,” first published in the New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1855,  reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, July 3, 1858.

 

4.  “Songs of the Blacks,” Dwight’s Journal of Music, 15 November 1856.

 

5.  Hutton, “The Negro on the Stage,” Harper’s June 1889.

 

6.  Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the rise of early Negro minstrelsy, p. 275.  Emmet wrote the fife-and-drum manual for the Union Army.

 

7.  Sarah Richardson, “The History of the Real Jim Crow,” American History,  April, 2018. 

 

8.  Cory Rosenberg, “Ole’ Zip Coon is a Mighty Learned Scholar: Blackface Minstrelsy as Reflection and Foundation of American Popular Culture,” Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era, Volume 3 Article 6, 2013.

 

9.  Eric Lott, "’The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1991).

 

10. Anthony J. Berret, S. J., “Huckleberry Finn and the Minstrel Show,” American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (fall 1986). 

 

11.  John S. C. Abbott, David Crockett: His Life and Adventures, pt. 4.

 

12.  Indifference or relief at a master’s death appears in numerous other minstrel songs as well, the most familiar being “Jimmy Crack Corn,” a song popularized by Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rice sheet music publication 1832

Jump Jim Crow
 

1
Come listen all you galls and boys
I's just from Tuckyhoe,
I'm goin to sing a little song,
My name is Jim Crow

Chorus

Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.
 

2
Oh, I'm a roarer on de Fiddle,
And down in old Virginny,
They say I play de skyentific
Like Massa Pagannini.
 

3
I git 'pon a flat boat
I cotch de Uncle Sam
Den I went to see de place
Where dey kill'd Packenham.

4
I went down to de riber,
I did'nt mean to stay,
But dere I see so many galls,
I couldn't get away.

 

5
And den I go to Orleans
An feel so full of fight
Dey put me in de Calaboose,
An keep me dare all night.
 

6
When I got out I hit a man,
His name I now forget,
but dere was nothing left
'Sept a little grease spot
 

7
I wip my weight in wildcats
I eat an Alligator,
And tear up more ground
Dan kifer 50 load of tater
 

8
I sit upon a Hornet's nest,
I dance upon my head,
I tie a Wiper' round my neck
And den I go to bed.
 

9
Dere's Possum up de gumtree
An Raccoon in de hollow,
Wake Snakes for June bugs
Stole my half a dollar
 

10
A ring tail'd monkey
An a rib nose Babboon,
Went out de odder day
To spend de arternoon.
 

11
Oh de way dey bake de hoecake
In old Virginny neber tire
Dey put de hoe upon de foot
An hole it to de fire.
 

12
Oh by trade I am a carpenter,
But be it understood,
De way I get my liben is,
By sawing de tick oh wood.
 

13
I'm a full blooded niggar,
Oh de real ole stock,
An wid my head and shoulder
I can split a horse block.
 

14
I struck a Jersey niggar,
In de street de oder day,
An I hope I neber stir
If he didn't turn gray.
 

15
I'm berry much afraid of late
Dis jumping will be no good.
For while de Crow are dancing,
De Wites will saw de wood.
 

16
But if dey get honest,
By sawing wood like slaves
Der'es an end to de business,
Ob our friend Massa Hays.
 

17
I met a Philadelphia niggar
Dress'd up quite nice & clean
But de way he 'bused de Yorkers
I thought was berru mean.
 

18
So I knocked down dis Sambo
And shut up his light,
For I'm jist about as sassy,
As if I was half white.
 

19
But he soon jumped up again,
An 'gan for me to feel,
Says I go away you niggar,
Or I'll skin you like an eel.
 

20
I'm so glad dat I'm a niggar,
And don't you wish you was too
For den you'd gain popularity
By jumping Jim Crow.
 

21
Now my brodder niggars,
I do not think it right,
Dat you should laugh at dem
Who happen to be white.
 

22
Kase it dar misfortune,
And dey'd spend ebery dollar,
If dey only could be
Gentlemen ob colour.
 

23
It almost break my heart,
To see dem envy me,
And from my soul I wish dem,
Full as black as we.
 

24
What stuf it is in dem,
To make de Debbil black
I'll prove dat he is white
In de twinkling of a crack.
 

25
For you see loved brodders,
As true as he had a tail,
It is his very weakness
What makes him turn pale.
 

26
I went to Hoboken,
To hab a promenade,
An dar I see de pretty gals,
Drinking de Lemonade.
 

27
Dat sour and dat sweet,
Is berry good by gum',
But de best of lemonade is,
Made by adding rum.
 

28
At de Swan cottage,
Is de place I tink,
Whar dey make dis 'licious
An 'toxicating drink.
 

29
Some go to Weehawk,
An some to Brooklyn hight
But dey better stay at home,
If dey want to see de sight.
 

30
To go to de museum,
I'm sure it is dare duty,
If for noting else,
Jist to see de sleeping beauty.
 

31
An dare is daddy Lambert,
An a skeleton on he hunkie,
An likeness of Broadway dandy
In a glass case of monkies.
 

32
De Broadway bells,
When dey carry full sail,
Around dem wear a funny ting,
Just like a fox tail.
 

33
When you hear de name of it,
I sure it make you roar,
Why I ax'd 'em what it was,
And dey said it was a boar.
 

34
De great Nullification,
And fuss in de South,
Is now before Congress,
To be tried by word ob mouth.
 

35
Dey hab had no blows yet,
And I hope dey nebber will,
For its berry cruel in bredren
One anoders blood to spill.
 

36
Wid Jackson at de head,
Dey soon de ting may settle
For ole Hickory is a man,
Dat's tarnal full ob mettle.
 

37
Should dey get to fighting,
Perhaps de blacks will rise,
For deir wish for freedom,
Is shining in deir eyes.
 

38
An if de blacks should get free,
I guess dey'll fee some bigger,
An I shall concider it,
A bold stroke for de niggar.
 

39
I'm for freedom,
An for Union altogether,
Aldough I'm a black man,
De white is call'd my broder.
 

40
I'm for a union to a gal,
An dis is a stubborn fact,
But if I marry an dont like it,
I'll nullify de act.
 

41
I'm tired of being a single man
An I'm tarmined to get a wife
For what I think de happiest
Is de swee married life.
 

42
Its berry common 'mong de white
To marry and get divorced
But dat I'll nebber do
Unless I'm really forced
 

43
I think I see myself in Broadway
Wid my wife upon my arm,
And to follow up de fashion,
Dere sure can be no harm.
 

44
An I caution all white dandies,
Not to come in my way,
For if dey insult me,
dey'll in de gutter lay.

 

 

 

Old Zip Coon (1834)
 

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
Den over dubble trubble, Zip Coon will jump.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.           10
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

O it's old Suky blue skin, she is in lub wid me,
I went the udder arter noon to take a dish ob tea;
What do you tink now, Suky hab for supper,
Why chicken foot an possum heel, widout any butter.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.               20

Did you eber see the wild goose, sailing on de ocean,
O de wild goose motion is a bery pretty notion;
Ebry time de wild goose, beckons to de swaller,
You hear him google google google google goller.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

I tell you what will happin den, now bery soon,
De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon;   30
Dare General Jackson, will him lampoon,
An de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

And wen Zip Coon our President shall be,
He make all de little Coons sing possum up a tree;
O how de little Coons, will dance an sing,
Wen he tie dare tails togedder, cross de lim dey swing. 40
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

Now mind wat you arter, you tarnel kritter Crocket,
You shant go head widout ole Zip, he is de boy to block it;
Zip shall be President, Crocket shall be vice,
An den dey two togedder, will hab de tings nice.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.              50
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
 

I hab many tings to tork about, but don't know which come first,
So here de toast to old Zip Coon, before he gin to rust;
May he hab de pretty girls, like de King ob ole,
To sing dis song so many times, 'fore he turn to mole.
 

O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.                  60
 

 

 

Gumbo Chaff  (1850)
 

On de Ohio bluff in de state of Indiana,
Dere's where I live, chock up to de Habbana,
Eb'ry mornin early Massa gib me likker,
I take my net and paddle and I put out de quicker,
I jump into my kiff and I down the river driff,
And I cotch as many cat fish as ever nigger liff
 

Now dis morning on a driff log tink I see an Alligator,
I scull my skiff around and chuck him sweet potatoe,
I cratch him on de head and try for to vex it,
But I couldn't fool de varmint now how I could fix it;        10
So I picks a brick an' I fotch'd him sich a lick,
But twant nothin' but a pine knot 'pom a big stick.
 

Now old Mass build a barn to put de fodder in,
Dis ting an dat ting an' one ting anodder;
Thirty ninth Decembur time come a rise ob water,
An' it carry Massas barn much farder dan it ought to;
Then old Massa swear, he cuss an' tare his hair,
Becase de water tuck de Barn off he cou'dnt tell where.
 

Now old Massa die on de lebenteenth of April,
I put him in de troff what cotch de sugar maple,                   20
I digs a deep hole right out upon de level,
An' I do believe sure enough he's gone to de debil,
For when he live you know he light upon me so,
But now he's gone to tote de firewood way down below.
 

Den Missis she did marry Big Bill de weaver,
Soon she found out he was a gay deceiver,
He grab all de money and he put it in his pocket,
And de way he did put out was a sin to Davy Crocket;
So old Missis cry and 'gin to wipe her eye,
For she marry Bill de weaver she cou'dnt tell why.                 30
 

Now one day de sun gone down an' de days work over,
Old Gumbo Chaff he tink he'd live in Clover;
He jump into a boat wid his old Tamborine,
While shoonerhead Sambo play'd de Violin;
De way we sail'd to New Orleans never be forgotten,
Dey put me on de Levy dock to roll a bale of Cotton.
 

When I cotch hold de bale oh! den you ought to seen us!
First time dis child 'gan to show his genus;
I got hold de corner an' I give him such a hug,
An' I light upon him like a duck 'pon a june bug;                      40
Oh! you ought to been dare to see de Niggers laff,
For dey swore it was de debil or old Gumbo Chaff.
 

I lern'd to talk de French oh! a la mode de dancey,
Kick him shoe, tare him wool, parle vo de Francey,
None jaw Madamselle, Stevadors and Riggers,
Apple jack and sassafras and little Indian Niggers;
De natives laff'd an swore dat I was corn'd,
For dey neber heard sich French since dey was born'd.
 

I leab New Orleans early one day morning,
I jump'd aboard de boat jist as de day was dawning,                  50
I hide behind de wood where de Niggers allways toss'um,
And lay low like de Coon when him tries to fool de Possum;
I lay dare still doe 'twas rather diffikill,
An dey did'nt find me out 'till I got to Louisville.
 

Dare Jim beats de drum an old Joe's de fifer,
An I is dat child what can read an cifer;
Twice one is five den carry six to seven,
Twice six is twenty nine an eighteen's eleven,
So 'twixt you and me its very plain to see,
Dat I learnt to play de Banjo by de double rule of three.             60
 

Now I rive on our farm on de Ohio Bluff,
An' I tink of fun an' frolick old Gumbo's had enough;
Oh! de white folks at home I very much amuse,
When I sing dis song an tell 'em all de news;
So we'd music all night an dey set up sich a laff
When I introduced de Niggers to Mrs Gumbo Chaff.

John Brown Speaks to Us

 John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois

      W. E. B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown, though it relies on first-hand and documentary sources, is less a work of historical scholarship than a passionate polemic first published at a critical moment in American history.  Even as the mythic Lost Cause ideology was developing and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was erecting monuments in courthouse squares and city parks throughout the South, the NAACP was formed and Du Bois published this biography. [1]

      The book contains a detailed and sympathetic account of Brown’s career and includes lengthy quotation from writings by his family members and associates.  The reader can see not only the vicious motives and tactics of the slave-owners, but also the fragmented rivalry of those on the side of freedom.  In Du Bois’ account it is clear that Brown’s moral clarity, couched throughout his life in the rhetoric of the Separate Baptist Church in which he had been raised, was shared by very few Americans before the Civil War.  The greater part of those who opposed the expansion of slavery did so because they wished to avoid the competition of slave labor with free or because they supported the political sway of the North over the South.  Even among those who argued against slavery itself, a good many benevolent souls such as those in the American Colonization Society supported not integration but the return of slaves to Africa or their settlement in a new country in Central America. 

     One reason that few shared the “clear, white light” of Brown’s moral certainty is that, for all their charitable feeling, most white Americans kept their Black brethren at arm’s length.  Brown recalled from his childhood an incident in which he received hospitality in a householder’s home as he drove his father’s cattle to market.  There he met a Black slave of his own age who impressed him as “fully if not more than his equal,” yet who was treated harshly by his owner.  This personal acceptance was apparent in Brown’s adult life as he consistently practiced social equality, inviting Blacks into his home and visiting in theirs, informally adopting a Black son, and seeking to include Black collaborators in his work. 

     Brown is an excellent example of a man who sought progressive change, not out of pity but because he considered their freedom a necessary precondition for his own.  His education had been primarily from the Bible, and Biblical values and language were woven throughout his own thinking.  This orientation was not only in tune with broadly shared American standards at the time, but religion’s claim to universal authority is appropriate since slavery, like murder and the oppression of women, is condemned by virtually all modern moral standards.  Brown’s prophetic voice, while thoroughly Christian, can still appeal to all.

    For those who contemplate a life like Brown’s, historical fact and partisan view may be considerably entangled.  Du Bois clearly has an interest in maintaining not only that Brown was sane (if fiercely single-minded) but also that his plan to attack the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry had a reasonable prospect of success. [2]  Whether this point of the plot’s practicality is so or not must remain controversial and speculative, but for the modern reader the point is that Brown’s opposition to slavery was exemplary and his zeal cannot be faulted. 

     John Brown tells us that the price of repression is greater than the price of freedom, that violence is far more pernicious when it is institutional and habitual than when it is a matter of an evil-tempered individual.  Every day that the slave system persisted people became inured to its crimes against humanity, more accepting of its outrages, and thus more brutalized.  A more or less benevolent master remains a master.  In Brown’s opinion the solution must lie, not in the reformation of individuals as John Woolman had attempted in the eighteenth century, but in the alteration of society.  To allow an exploitative system like slavery, or, one might add, colonialism or capitalism, to continue is to sanction violence whether or not one is personally wielding the whip.  Lincoln eloquently argued in his Second Inaugural that the moral debt of slavery was always increasing and, painful though it be, must in the end be paid.  “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’"  Now, long after the Civil War, after the attempts by racists to perpetuate injustice have produced a hundred and fifty years of violence, lynchings, Jim Crow, and daily exploitation and repression, the cost is evident to all, and still rising. 

     Brown tells us, then, that the time to act is now.  Hesitation is complicity.  No shrewd calculation of odds can alter the facts that racism is wrong, that its ill effects consistently harden and deepen, and that it entails consequences that spare no one. [4]  Others may be depended upon to criticize, to temporize, to offer only financial support, but some feel called to take action.  Further, Brown speaks for the harder truth of his own day, that slavery’s foes must use “any means necessary,” and the price it seemed could be payable only in blood. [5]  He had abandoned the faith in political pressure and moral suasion to which his friend and associate Frederick Douglass still clung.  He sought to have a wider effect than Harriet Tubman had managed with her daring raids. (Tubman, in fact, supported Brown, joined with him in planning the assault on Harpers Ferry, and during the war served in the Union army.)   

     Du Bois seems to be straining just a bit when he enumerates the positive effects of the raid in spite of its military defeat.  He quotes Douglass: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he at least began the war that ended slavery.”  Du Bois argues that his raid aroused the slave population leading to incidents of rebellion and presaging the hundreds of thousands of Black recruits that served in the United States Army.  The fear of insurrection from within and the conviction that Brown had brought a mere taste of the potential for armed Northern intervention created a sense of crisis that, Du Bois argues, hastened the conflict.  Finally, he says, Brown presented a moral dilemma to Americans in the most fundamental terms.  People heard of a good, indeed a Christian man, who sacrificed himself out of love for others, killed by the advocates of a system built on the sins of greed, cruelty, and lust. [6]       Few would question that Brown’s actions shifted the political parameters in his day.  Whereas anti-slavery propagandists had seemed the South’s chief antagonists, they now had to deal with the fact of armed opposition.  Just as the rise of Black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (later Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) made the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King seem suddenly more acceptable, even those who did not approve of Brown’s actions became more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, so his actions had a clear effect of hastening the end of slavery.

     Though many moderns may lack the fire and the courage of “the old man,” as he was often called in the days of his greatest action, he clearly advanced the cause of freedom.  Brown’s passion for justice is inspiring, and much of his analysis remains viable today.   Today, no less than in his era, racism remains a great evil, the pursuit of racial justice continues, and the movement’s most vigorous partisans feel as he did that action is imperative regardless of short-term consequences, whether for the nation or for the activist.  One need not share the rhetoric of Brown’s Calvinist theology to applaud his militance.  Right is right.

 

1.      1.  The book was published in 1909.  My copy is an International Press edition from 1962 including comments by Du Bois indicating his view of the book’s relevance after almost half a century.  It remains no less useful now when the work is more than twice as old. 

 

2.      2.  He claims that the primary reason for the defeat of Brown’s party, small though it was, was the failure of the timely arrival of supplies from the farm a few miles distant.

 

3.      3.  Lincoln had long been a supporter of such plans.  One hears little these days about his plan to establish Lincolnia, an African-American colony in the Chiriquí Province of Panama which foundered in the face of opposition by Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

 

4.      4.  The murder rate among both white and Black remains highest in the states of the Deep South, for instance, where slavery was most brutal.

 

 5.     5.  I am reminded of the turn from its fifty years of pacifism taken by the African National Congress in 1960.

 

6.      6.  I find a parallel in the effect of photographs of early civil rights demonstrations in journals like Life and Look.

In Memory of my Generation’s People’s Heroes

     In every town are war memorials: statues, parks, shrines, and solemn ceremonies recalling those who donned uniforms and obeyed their officers, and indeed the travails of such people (on all sides and in all wars) can be considerable. Their suffering touches many, and their commemoration is accordingly social and official. Politicians and relatives alike glibly say that their sacrifice maintained American freedom, though what there is of American freedom has not been threatened from without since the War of 1812, most certainly not by Kaiser Bill, Ho Chi Minh, or Saddam Hussein.
     Those who died for the people’s cause are fewer, and sparks of their memory (such as this) are obscure and idiosyncratic. Yet it is this group that has, by the purest voluntarism in most cases, sought to advance humanity as a whole in work that has laid the foundation of the comparative comfort enjoyed by many today. The grasping hands of the powerful will make no concession voluntarily; even the mildest of reforms come only when forced. Frederick Douglass was correct in his celebrated analysis and deserves quoting yet one more time.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [1]

     In other countries and in the USA in days gone by, the killing of political rebels was wholesale and unashamed. The first verse of the old song “The Red Flag” spoke no more than sober reality for all its clothing of sentimental rhetoric.

The People's Flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold. [2]

     Though every country produced such people’s martyrs, I mean here to commemorate only Americans. I conceive the group broadly otherwise, accepting as those who labored for a brighter future: community and labor organizers, socialists, anarchists, communists of various stripes, supporters of civil rights, feminists, ecologists and gay activists. I include people outrightly assassinated by law enforcement or military as well as some who ended their own lives as a political statement. [3] No scholar of American history, I simply write about the people whom I recall and a few others whose names I only recently learned. This list is unsystematic and certainly incomplete, but I feel that simply naming these few names is justified by simple respect for those who genuinely sacrificed for us all. Perhaps, as well, the young and others unfamiliar with the people mentioned here might learn. I welcome additions.
     My own roll call includes only my generation and emphasizes the movements of the sixties, though I am aware of massacres such as those during the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania in 1892 (nine killed), at Lattimer -- another Pennsylvania mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania -- in 1897 (nineteen dead), at Ludlow, Colorado in 1914 (twenty-six killed), Everett, Washington in 1916 (twelve victims) and the 1921 Rising of Logan County, West Virginia in which between fifty and a hundred workers fell, the Little Steel Strike of 1937 when ten demonstrators were killed by Chicago police and sixteen more fell in Youngstown, Ohio. I am aware that controversy has muddied the narrative for such victims of the judicial system as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Whatever the details, like those regularly killed on urban streets by police officers, these people did not receive fair trials or just sentences and thus are victims of political persecution whatever their guilt or innocence.
     Doubtless the greatest number of political killings occurred in the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Fortunately in this case, scholars have documented the deaths of activists, and they are remembered in the only such monument of which I am aware, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Archivists have verified the deaths of forty-one people in the Movement from 1954-1968. [4] They include also a list of seventy-four others who had not yet been killed or for whom the historical research had been in process when the memorial was dedicated. Among those honored there are such well-known names as James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who died in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi as well as others such as Lamar Smith who had organized voters in his community and was shot on the courthouse lawn in midday in Brookhaven, Mississippi in 1955 and William Lewis Moore, a white postman from Baltimore murdered in Attalla, Alabama during his solitary march against segregation in 1963.
     A late spasm of criminal racist violence occurred in 1979 when Klan and Nazi Party members killed five Communist Workers activists during a protest in Greensboro, North Carolina: Sandi Smith, James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cauce, and Michael Nathan. The dead included three physicians (one of whom served as president of a textile workers local). The police provided no protection; indeed, there were not present on the scene of the demonstration though it had been announced well in advance, and the assailants were acquitted by all white juries in spite of film documenting the murders.
     The police regularly reacted with fierce disregard for law during demonstrations in those days and were sufficiently reckless that occasionally someone died. Dean Johnson was killed in Chicago in 1968 at the beginning of the historic demonstrations around the Democratic Convention, and in 1969 James Rector died in Berkeley while demonstrating in behalf of People’s Park. Most everyone is at least aware of the 1970 attack at Kent State in Ohio in which National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds at demonstrators, killing Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, and Allison Krause. One hears considerably less about the deaths of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green less than two weeks later at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, or about Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, and Henry Ezekial Smith who were shot and killed by police in 1968 at South Carolina State in Orangeburg while protesting a segregated bowling alley. The victims in Mississippi and South Carolina, needless to say, were black.
     Many people remember television news reports of the dramatic suicide of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon in 1963. The evening news on the American networks showed the monk maintaining his meditation posture as his body burned. A few might recall the self-immolation of Quaker Norman Morrison in 1965 below Secretary of Defense McNamara’s Pentagon office. The fact is that a bit before Morrison’s act, Alice Herz, an eighty-two year Holocaust survivor, had similarly emulated Thích Quảng Đức in Detroit in 1965. A little later that year Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself in protest in New York City as did Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles in 1967, Bruce Mayrock in New York City in 1969 (protesting Biafran War policies), George Winne, Jr. burned himself in San Diego in 1970, as did Gregory Levey in Amherst in 1991 (protesting the Gulf War), Kathy Change in Philadelphia in 1996 (protesting “the present government and economic system”), and Malachi Ritscher in Chicago in 2006 in reaction to the Iraq War. [5]
     It is difficult to calculate the precise number of wholly unjustified killings of Black Panthers by law enforcement. Their attorney Charles Garry claimed that police had wantonly murdered thirty Panthers between January of 1968 and December of 1969 alone. A hostile journalist challenged the circumstances of many of these killings, conceding only the deaths of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark as altogether unjustified. [6] Considering the state’s interest in lying or obscuring the facts in many of these cases and the unquestioned program by the government to foment violence among black activists, it may never be clear what happened in many of these cases.
     The case of Hampton and Clark is particularly egregious. In one of the clearest examples of political assassination by the state in American history, the Chicago police with the aid of the FBI and an informer in the Black Panther organization drugged Hampton with secobarbitol and then burst into the Panthers’ apartment with guns firing in 1969, killing the two while they lay in bed and wounding four others. No one was ever prosecuted for the violence though the families of the dead and injured won a civil suit years later due to the overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the government.
     Throughout history the wealthy have held the power. They have never ceded a penny to others unless they had no choice, while the poor are regularly sent off to the front lines of imperialist wars and other military adventures. Through organization, struggle, strikes, and demonstrations the masses have gained a modicum of comfort in the developed world. If today slavery and child labor have ended, women have the vote, labor unions have won some measure of shorter hours, job safety, and a piece of the economic pie, albeit far smaller than workers deserve, it is only because of those who have championed the people’s causes. If you and I appreciate what we have of leisure, a portion of the fruits of our labor, and a bit of space in which to raise the next protest, it is only right that now and then we devote a moment’s thought to those who have been willing to put their bodies on the line in defense of us all.



1. West India Emancipation speech in Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857.

2. The Irishman Jim Connell’s song has been an anthem of the British Labour Party and the IWW, among other organizations. It was recently sung by those celebrating the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party Leader.

3. I do not include many righteous activists who were themselves wielding deadly force such as the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970 or Americans such as priest James Carney and former Green Beret David Arturo Baez who had joined insurgents and were killed by the Honduran military in 1983. In the case of Black Panthers the record is often obscure though the government’s desire to eliminate the organization is certain. (See note 6 below.)

4. Their list is available at https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs.

5. The New York Times story on Levey’s death in 1991 mentions two other self-immolations protesting the Gulf War and eight in protest to the Vietnam War but provides no further details.

6. See Edward Jay Epstein “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?” in The New Yorker for February 13, 1971.