Playing with Race: Blackface and "The Backyard Minstrels"

"The Backyard Minstrels" was the name and theme of the variety show State's Mates put on in 1960. Members dressed in blackface and portrayed caricatures of African Americans for their white audience.

State's Mates' minstrel show was advertised in a local newspaper to promote attendance. 

Within the script for the minstrel show, a number of African Americans who had left the South and become popular as minstrel entertainers return to perform.  This picture depicts their entrance onstage, singing "Dixie."

"Mammy" is one of the main characters in the "Backyard Minstrels" script, reinforcing a stereotypical role of black womanhood.

Several of the "talents" within the variety show were worked into the theme, and performed in blackface.  This photograph depicts two State's Mates members performing "Rockabye Your Baby."

Not all of the performances in the variety show were directly connected to the theme.  Here, two State's Mates performing "Twice Foot Two" are being observed by the rest of the cast.

The script for State's Mates' minstrel show uses many old tropes associated with minstrelsy. At the same time, it indirectly acknowledged the ways that African American society was different from the conventional minstrel stereotypes: several of the characters lived in Chicago for a time, and were able to make money as performers.

This posed photograph was probably taken independently of the talent show itself.  It was worked into a collage in a future yearbook, showing how much social importance State's Mates placed on this particular variety show.

This State's Mate wanted her picture taken, in blackface, before she went onstage.

State's Mates' most elaborate portrayal of race relations was given in their April 1960 variety show, "The Backyard Minstrels."  This old-fashioned caricature of blackness, which had its origins in antebellum America, involved many of State's Mates' members putting on blackface and wearing black nylons to portray stereotyped African Americans.  Despite the fact that North Carolina State University had begun to admit African American students on an extremely limited basis, no one questioned the propriety of such a show.  In fact, photographic advertisements of the show were printed in a local paper.

Recent scholarship on minstrel shows demonstrates that they were, in origin, in part a socially acceptable outlet for disgruntled lower classes, who borrowed the voices of one of America's lowest social groups to criticize upper classes safely.  However, beginning in the 1840’s, these forms of entertainment were co-opted by the middle class to legitimate their social—and increasingly, racial—position.  Sharp slaves were replaced by thick-witted ones, and social criticism faded.  Despite the “taming” of minstrelsy, though, blackface productions like State’s Mates continued to be “inversions” through the twentieth century, because they reversed the status quo in allowing whites to dress up as and pretend to be blacks.

“The Backyard Minstrels” fits fully into the later forms of minstrel shows, in which African Americans were systematically stereotyped as stupid.  Despite this, however, the script for the performance shows that State’s Mates were, to some extent, confronting the conflicts between the traditional, slave-based minstrel show and the realities of race in 1960.  The program is set in the twentieth century, and the “minstrels” in this case are African Americans who had moved to the North and made it big by performing on the radio as the “Lazy Noon Minstrels.”  One of the white characters says that they “sing songs in the old way,” suggesting that this very form of entertainment was becoming unrealistically outdated.  Any potential for sophistication among the “Lazy Noon Minstrels” is quickly cut short, though: the minstrels use overly grandiose words without understanding their meaning.  Even these confrontations only served to reinforce existing stereotypes.

Even though “The Backyard Minstrels” acknowledged economic changes among African Americans, it remained willfully ignorant of the challenges that African American and white activists were raising against the racial norms of the time.  North Carolina State University was becoming integrated to a very limited extent, and while the university was dragging its heels, activists were encouraging the federal government to speed the rate of integration.  Such patterns of conflict were characteristic of the South at the time, as African Americans engaged in sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent demonstration to end legalized racial segregation.  By continuing in a form of entertainment that was ultimately rooted in the subordinate status of African Americans, State’s Mates was clearly siding with those who opposed civil rights.

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