The Palimpsest
Volume 71 Number 2 Article 5
6-1-1990
Blackface in the White Mind: Racial Stereotypes in Sioux City, Iowa, 1874-1910
William L. Hewitt
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Recommended Citation Hewitt, William L. "Blackface in the White Mind: Racial Stereotypes in Sioux City, Iowa, 1874-1910." The Palimpsest 71 (1990), 68-79. Available at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/palimpsest/vol71/iss2/5
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the State Historical Society of Iowa at Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Palimpsest by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BLACKFACE in the WHITE MIND Racial Stereotypes in Sioux City, Iowa, 1874-1910
by William L. Hewitt
URN-OF-THE-CENTURY Sioux Cit- understanding of blacks, they borrowed what ians took pride in their city, situated on understanding they did have from abstract por a bend of the Missouri River where trayals of black personalities on the stage. The Nebraska and South Dakota meet Iowa. stereotypical image of blacks associated with They saw their community as a progressive one the idyllic and carefree gang labor on ante with few social problems. They considered bellum plantations received constant rein themselves benevolent and paternalistic in forcement in Sioux City through such popular their dealings with their own small population entertainment as Uncle Tom s Cabin and min of blacks. Black-white relations certainly strel shows. From 1870 to 1915, for example, seemed amicable, since there had never been Sioux Citians saw 237 productions of Uncle an incident of racial v iolence that anvone✓ could Tom’s Cabin and minstrel shows. These per recall. Nevertheless, upon examination, Sioux formances provided compelling images of Citians — as consumers of the popular enter blacks and of white relationships with blacks. tainment accessible to them — directed a sur The popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first prising amount of ridicule toward their black published by author Harriet Beecher Stowe in population. Borrowing from plays, minstrel 1852, provided a stock of memorable charac shows, best-selling novels, and movies, whites terizations for stage productions. Characters adopted racist stereotypes of blacks that ranged such as the benevolent Kentucky plantation from the contented plantation worker to the owner Mr. Selby; Eliza fleeing her pursuers vicious black “beast/ These attitudes, proba over the ice; angelic little Eva; comical Topsy bly representative of those of many turn-of- and Mark the Lawyer; and especially the the-century white Americans, are revealed in drunken and brutal Simon Legree and the def the theater reviews, news reports, and edi erential Uncle Tom contributed to the torial cartoons of Sioux City newspapers and audience s romanticized view of plantation life. provide chilling evidence of the racism in Even a bad production of the play, as the mainstream America a century ago. Although reviewer for the Sioux City Journal observed in Sioux Citians increasingly accepted negative 1881, drew “to the front of the foot-lights hun and critical images of blacks, they resisted the dreds who look upon the ordinary theater most extreme manifestations of racism. going as sinful pleasure. The reviewer noted, Since most Sioux Citians had little first-hand furthermore, that evervbodv* ^ is familiar with
68 THE PALIMPSEST the book upon which the play is founded, and Democrats usurping the newly gained voting though Mother Stowe might be excused for rights of blacks. These developments moved holding up her hands in holy horror at the Iowans to protect blacks in the state from such liberties taken with her characters, there is an abuses. A referendum passed in 1868 removed interest bordering on the morbid attached to the word “white’ from the state constitution the historic volume which enables its drama and guaranteed black men the vote; in 1880 a tization to draw like a funeral. One production attempted to increase the appeal of the play by introducing two Topsy characters, two Mark the Lawyer characters, and “two trick donkeys and six mammoth blood hounds for the chase scenes. The popularity of the play in Sioux City, and in surrounding towns visited by theatrical syn dicates, created such demand for the novel that the local bookseller could not meet the requests. A Sioux City Daily Times reporter in 1883 contended that the book provided suit able reading material for the freedom loving elements of Christendom. Long after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the book and the play still evoked the same response Stowe had sought in the 1850s. The Sioux City Daily ELIZA’S ESCAPE ON THE FLOATING ICE, followed at full Times reporter asserted in 1883, in fact, that speed by the Furious Pack of Panting Blood “whether the present spontaneous and simul hounds, goaded on to madness by th eir less taneous revival of the demand for copies of savage masters. Uncle Tom s Cabin is a premonition, or warn THE I0 S T THBILLOIS SCENE EYED DEPICTED ing to democrats in power to ‘go slow/ and to embryo republicans to wake up to the duties of the present and the future, would make a fine All the CHARACTERS ARE LIFE-LIKE I subject for lyceum discussion. AND NO DOUBLING OF ANY PART. The moral tone in many of the stage produc Those who have witnessed this Wonderful Play are tions of the novel outweighed any compunction always anxious co see it once more, because it fives on moral grounds an opponent might have had them Joy and they always learn a Lesson of Morality. to theater productions in general. The Sioux City Journal had editorialized in 1878 that Uncle Tom s Cabin should be regarded as “so mild and moral that even tolerably strict church members may see it performed without compromising themselves in regard to those matters which are popularly supposed to be required of professors of religion. Although Uncle Tom s Cabin clearly estab lished the stereotype of compliant plantation slaves, its sentimental and moral message also dramatically/ reinforced Sioux Citians’ and other Iowans commitment to egalitarianism for blacks. Their rejection of the antebellum planter class and reaction to the failure of Early popular entertainment such as minstrel shows and Reconstruction led to state legislation protec Uncle Tom's Cabin perpetuated racial stereotypes and tive of blacks. Iowans resented southern white sentimental attitudes about plantation life.
SUMMER 1990 69 state constitutional amendment removed the barrier to blacks serving in the state legis lature. Just when southerners, especially, adopted more stringent Jim Crow,” or segre gation, measures, the 1884 Iowa legislature passed a civil rights act affirming that ‘‘all per sons within this state shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of inns, public conveyances, barber shops, theaters and other places of amusement. ” In 1892, the legislature added to the list restaurants, chop houses, eating houses, lunch counters, refresh ment stands, and bathhouses.
ET AS IOWANS moved to protect the civil rights of blacks, they also wit nessed changes in the ways blacks were portrayed in popular entertain IlfimlRomr Votinv Hrnnr ttf. ment. In 1874, before more elaborate opera houses seated blacks only in balconies and pro By distorting physical features and dialect, cartoons such as these two poked fun at blacks for seeking inclusion in vided box seats for wealthy* whites, the what whites considered an exclusively white past, and reviewer for the Journal noted that if any show for copying northern fashions. (Sioux City Journal, June could draw a full house at the Academvy of 2, 1902 and February 17, 1900). Music it was a minstrel performance, whereby "the aristocracy from ‘Codfish Hill jostles the Blacks, and white actors in blackface, por low breds of the levee. Like Uncle Tom s trayed plantation slaves as untutored, simple, Cabin, minstrel shows evoked "the flavor of docile, and manageable, or as unambitious and the sunny south, of the camp meeting, and of lazy buffoons. White audiences saw blacks as, the cotton field,” as suggested by the Alabama essentially, perpetual children or comical fools Quartet’s harmonizing of "fun on the old plan in need of white guidance and supervision. In tation.” But minstrel shows augmented the time, these images came to be lumped plantation stereotype with a repertoire of more together under the label “Sambo. The down negative images and distortions. A new and cast eyes of the Sambo, along with shuffling more elaborate Peavey Grand Opera House, feet, soft, uncertain words, and a totally pliant built in 1888, provided the Primrose and Dock- manner, were white-invented signals to be stader Big Minstrels with a large and enthusi used by a black character to say that this indi astic audience on Saturday, October 10, 1898. vidual posed no threat. The highlight of their performance occurred Another feature of minstrel shows, the high- when "a watermelon ten feet high and reaching kicking, strutting cake walk, became popular across the stage is sliced so as to show the after the 1870s. The cake walk had originated luscious meat and the black seeds . . . the lat on plantations when slaves dressed in their ter representing the faces of pickaninnies.” masters’ and mistresses’ discarded finervy and Moreover, these later minstrel shows featur competed for a prize, usually a cake. Blacks ing what the local papers called “dusky,” affecting white standards and style of dress “ebony-faced,” Big Black Coons,” or "Ethio appealed to white egos. But to make the dis pian comedians firmly established the notion tinction clear and unambiguous — since more that blacks were inherentlyy musical — either and more northern blacks copied white fashion sadly resigned to their position (depicted by — whites looked for exaggerated ties, bouton mournful spirituals) or joyously carefree. nieres, vests, uses of handkerchiefs, or fabric
TO THE PALIMPSEST E M CLARK COLLECTION. SHSI AT THE FANCY DRESS BALL BALL DRESS FANCY THE AT hrces enocdwie efete and self-esteem white reinforced characters h—h sy’gi a, Rastus? as, yo’isShe—Whogoin She — I’se Marta Washington, I is. I Washington, I’seMarta She — Who’syo? Raleigh. WaltahSir RastusI’se — atrs s fcs o ter rtcs and criticism their for focus a as patterns createdand repeatedly portrayedthe contrast concludesin his study considered white performers in blackface superior to blacktominstrels. superior blackface in performers white considered ridicule ‘pretensions.of these ligencesocioeconomicand Robertstatus. Toll a e ht adecs el ueir n intel in superior feel audiences made white Black1910.Iowa,circainminstrelRuthven,perform singers Turn-of-the-century reported newspapers that audiences h ceto o uiru nrhr black northern ludicrous of creation The BlackingUp ,“Minstrels
capture the spiritof minstrelsythevisualcapture their in feelnotguiltywhites needaboutracial caste, o d o hm ad aiy ee completely family were and home of bonds blacks and contented, fulfilled Southern Southern fulfilled contented, and blacks secure.’’ loving the and society ordered properly was itre crctrs ih urgos hair outrageous with caricatures distorted portrayalof embellishedblacks, they the and i vsal. hs dsotd cartoon charac visually. distorteddid These caricatureseditorially did and blackface what addedasuperficial airof authenticitytoblack dialectthrough slurredword endings, mispro ticizedimages of a simpler,happier time minstrelwhen plantation alsothe furnished roman styles and enlarged ears, eyes, lips, and feet. lips, andstyles eyes,enlargedears, and itre iae o bak ofrd y white by blacks offered of images distorted Northern ludicrous inept, of caricaturesing wishy-washy imitation of what is usually well Negroes. Besides living’ providing proof that codn t a oa rvee, rvdd “a provided reviewer, local a to according nouncedwords,misunderstood and meanings terizations revealed subtle shifts toward a “new bestreviews. TheGeorgia Colored Minstrels, Sioux City as early as1883 but not always to the performedby a white Nonetheless, troop.’the Negro’’ image. M oreover, the use — or misuse — of black of misuse — or — use theMoreover, minstrels. Black minstreltroops had played in White audiences expected and preferred the esae cronss lo tepe to attempted also cartoonists Newspaper SUMMER 9 0 71 1990
Iowans in blackface enjoy themselves at a 1902 party. for minstrel purposes than the real article of negroes. That real fun and that real comedy reviewer continued, “Sioux Citians as a rule and wit which are found in the makeup of a seemed to take unexplicable [sic] pleasure in white minstrel comedian are wanting in nine flocking to the Academy of Music when the black minstrels out of ten.’ Thus what the trashiest kind of so-called amusement troupes reviewer revealed was the desire on the part of come here. Despite drawing good houses, whites to retain control of the images of blacks black entertainers did not provide the essence projected by minstrel players. of the minstrel show, according to Sioux City The consequences of minstrel shows in whites. “Minstrelsy by real black faces’ proved cluded jokes told and retold and vivid visual less popular since “playgoers are somewhat images that made black stereotypes “a kind of uncertain about the ability of negroes as enter national folklore,’ according to Houston A. tainers, and they save up their money for such Baker, Jr., in Modernism and the Harlem minstrelsy as Wm. West and Dockstader & Renaissance, “a constellation of images, defini Primrose are in the habit of furnishing,’ com tions, symbols, and meanings that most Ameri mented a Journal reviewer in April 1901. cans could and did share. When McCabe and Young’s Minstrels com bined white and black minstrel players for a performance in Sioux City in 1894, audiences were small. Although Sioux City audiences enjoyed per HITE AMERICANS, and Sioux formances bv* renowned black minstrels such as Citians as represented in this case Billy Kersands because of “his cavernous study, actually represented a spec mouth,’ they repeatedly preferred white men trum of racial attitudes that histo in blackface. After seeing a black minstrel show rianW Joel Williamson has broadly categorized as in 1901 the Journal reviewer found “further liberal, moderate, and radical. “Liberals” proof that white men make funnier black men believed, in brief, that they could accept blacks
72 THE PALIMPSEST even though they did not yet know their poten trusted. The Radical solution was complete tial. Liberals, however, were overwhelmingly separation of whites and blacks. outnumbered by “Moderates,” who always According to Liberals and Moderates, the assumed black inferiority, yet who might Radicals were whipping the masses into accept a degree of accommodation with blacks. frenzies of racial hatred that endangered the Moderates, or “accommodationists,” called for very foundations of society. Although they kindness towards blacks on the grounds that failed to change popular opinion in the South, they had retained under freedom many of the Liberals and Moderates partially restrained supposedly amiable characteristics of the Radical influence in the North. They began to faithful slaves under the paternalistic planta campaign against lynching and helped bring tion tradition. Surely images of loyal Uncle about a gradual decrease in racial murders of Tom and benevolent Messrs. Shelby and St. this type. Clare came to mind. To uphold their view of Yet in 1901 Sioux City narrowly escaped the the black as a harmless child or helpless ward, onus of a lynching. James McGuire, a black, these neopaternalists of the Progressive Era was arraigned in police court on October 28, on had to counter the charge that a growing inci the charge of sodomy with a thirteen-year-old dence of sexual attacks on white women messenger boy. Because of the talk of lynching reflected a fundamental bestialitvy in the black during the day, the chief of police moved race. In general, Moderates countered that McGuire from the city jail to the county jail. charge by pointing out that such crimes Shortly after McGuire arrived at the county remained so rare and exceptional that they jail, cell mate Matt Davey tried to escape while revealed nothing about the essential black character. “Radicals” were especially prominent dur ing the first two decades of the twentieth century. Under their “black degeneracy” hypothesis, a “new” or “beast Negro,” freed from the restrictions of slavery at the end of the Civil War, was retrogressing rapidly toward a natural state of savagery and bestiality. With the shift in orientation of minstrel shows from plantation to urban North, the “beast” and dumb comic stereotype, viciously spread by Radicals, supplanted the tragic or contented plantation black stereotypes adopted by Mod erates. Under the Radical mentality,y 7 blacks were seen as watermelon- and chicken-eating fools and the butt of jokes. Dice, gambling, chicken stealing, watermelons, bananas, ham bones, camp meetings, and a penchant for razors became trademarks of these urban caricatures. The coon song, moreover, assigned traits that emphasized grotesque physical features in big-footed, big-lipped, pop-eyed black car icatures. The menacing razor-toting black man SENATOR TILLMAN GIVES PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT A FEW completed the stereotype. These images, seen POINTERS ON HOW TO CONDUCT ONESELF IN OFFICE over and over, instilled fear of what Radicals The issue of lynch laws hangs from the hack of Senate termed the “bad coon and replaced the pater chair of a hysterical Benjamin Tillman, outspoken Radi nalism of the plantation. Subliminal messages cal. (January 19, 1906) portrayed blacks as subhumans, not to be REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE J N "DING" DARLING FOUNDATION
SUMMER 1990 73 working on the rock pile. After his recapture etv* offered no workable solution. • Davey said that he had thought he might he Sioux City’s rejection of the Radicals racial lynched if a mob breaking into jail had mis attitudes might best be gauged by local reac taken him for McGuire. The Journal made tion to Radical firebrand Benjamin F. Tillman, light» of the incident in its store0 titled “Coons a South Carolina senator. In the 1890s Tillman Might Look Alike. ” (This title echoed a song by had begun making nationally publicized anti variety show performer Clara Kimball on black statements. During his 1892 South Car December 14, 1897. According to a local news olina gubernatorial bid, for example, he paper review, Kimball sang, “All Coons Look declared, “I would lead a mob to lynch the Alike To Me in such a fetching manner that she negro who ravishes a white woman.” Sioux at once installed herself in the hearts of her City’s✓ reaction to Tillman revealed the residue hearers.”) of the Uncle Torn shows: Tillman was held to be the incarnation of “the barbarous depravity of ‘Legrees’ of the South.” Darling’s cartoons of Tillman make him look hysterical. Reverend Doctor F. E. Day, pastor of the Whitefield Methodist Church in Sioux City, declared at a meeting of the Ministerial Association that “he would a thousand times rather entertain a negro at this table than Benjamin F. Tillman.” LTHOUGH Sioux City Moderates did Day maintained that “as long as white people not usually object to the Radical continued to judge the colored man by the notions of black inferiority or the need worst example and the white man by the best for separation, they dissented from the example, just that long would the race separa extreme manifestations of the Radicals’ racism. tion continue. A partial explanation for their dissent might be Nevertheless, Tillman led American Radi the image of an evil Simon Legree persecuting cals in an increasingly vituperative litany of Uncle Tom, repeatedly witnessed in produc propaganda. Rape and the prescribed punish tions of Uncle Tom s Cabin. The creations of ment of lynching became their special preoc local newspaper cartoonists reveal most graph cupation. Lynching represented their ultimate ically the image Sioux City Moderates had of sociological method of racial control and blacks and of Radical approaches to what was repression. They used fear and terror to check termed “the Negro question.” The cartoons of “dangerous tendencies in the black commu Jay N. “Ding” Darling, for example, reflected nity, considered to be ineffectively regimented the consensus of the Sioux City communitv at or supervised. As such it constituted a Radical large. Later a Pulitzer Prize winner, Darling confession that the institutions of a segregated, began his career as cartoonist for the Sioux City or Jim Crow, society provided an inadequate Journal from 1901 to 1906. In a 1903 Darling measure of day-to-day control. cartoon, two enormous children are squaring Sioux Citv’sy black communitv y recoiled in off for a fight. The black child is labeled “Race reaction to the rash of lynchings at the end of [ Question,” and the white child, “Mob Law. In the nineteenth century. A meeting of about the foreground a much smaller Uncle Sam rolls thirty-five blacks and six whites on May 5, I up his sleeves and prepares to paddle them 1899, at the African Methodist Episcopal | with his shoe, labeled “Justice.” Darling thus Church, for example, had been precipitated by indicated his disdain for the Radicals’ use of thirty lynchings in the nation during the pre extralegal violence but apparently recognized ceding thirty days. The Journal reported that the size of the problem. In another 1903 car state senator J. S. Lothrop, local black leader toon, Darling depicted a northerner and a W. P. Shields, and Reverend J. A. Fisher southerner crowding a black man off the earth, spoke at the meeting, although “only [Fisher] thereby suggesting that the Radical position of displayed much indignation about the lynch providing no place for blacks in American soci- ings. They cautioned blacks not to “assume a
74 THE PALIMPSEST REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE J N DING" DARLING FOUNDATION
SENATOR TILLMAN'S IDEA OF SETTLING TEE NEGRO QUESTION IS TO KEEP IT STIRRED UP.
In his August 26, 1903, cartoon, “Ding” Darling represented the moderate viewpoint, editorializing against the political demagogue from South Carolina, Senator Benjamin F. Tillman.
SUMMER 1990 75 REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE J N "DING" DARLING FOUNDATION
rLALt TO GO BI T OFF THE COLORED m a n : “Land o' Lobe, White Man, Where Does You Low I s Gwine to Stan ?”
According to Darling, the stand taken by northerners and southerners left little room for blacks (August 3, 1903).
76 THE PALIMPSEST spirit of anarchy but to attend to “business and throat.” The act results in the suicide of the godliness [to] overcome prejudice.’ The group victim and her mother, followed by a solemn, adopted a resolution protesting against the portentous lynching by the Ku Klux Klan. cowardly slanders which southern apologists Dixon’s glorification of such fictional vigilante utter when they say that lynchings occur only action during Reconstruction offered his justifi to protect womanhood.” cation of similar retaliation by white mobs in his own time. Sioux City blacks realized the potential impact of The Leopard s Spots and The Clans man as stage productions before Dixon and D. W. Griffith produced The Birth of a YER NEW FORMS of popular enter Nation. (Coincidentally, during one of the tainment perpetuated the widespread many performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin in dissemination of radical racial propa Sioux City in 1906, a Journal reviewer sug ganda. The novelist who most fully gested that The Leopard's Spots had been exploited the literary possibilities arising from “written to offset the sympathy for the negro the fear was Thomas Dixon, whose novels of aroused by Uncle Tom's Cabin and that it might racial hatred were best sellers in the earlv✓ someday drive "Uncle Tom’ shows off the twentieth century. Dixon, a prominent Baptist road.”) When an upcoming theater production minister before he wrote sensationalist novels, of the Dixon novels was announced, the new thought of his work as an evangelical effort to black pastor in town implored his community transform the traditional stereotype of the to become more involved in the debate over innocuous black. As he wrote of his first novel, the race question. The Leopards Spots, 'It may shock the preju Described as “a progressive and active min dice of those who have idealized or worshiped ister, Reverend J. Cornelius Reid had as the negro as canonized in Uncle Tom. Is it not sumed the pastorate of the Mt. Zion Baptist time they heard the whole truth? Dixon pre Church in November 1906 after serving in sented the extreme racist position, the full lit Ft. Madison, Iowa. Believing that Dixon erary development of the concepts of black sought to increase racial prejudice and strife, degeneracy, animality, and "sexual Madness.” Reid stridently objected to the dramatization of The Leopards Spots, published in 1902, pro the novels, soon to be shown in a local theater. posed that the Civil War and Reconstruction The Sioux City Journal of February 24, 1907, had turned the black from “chattel to be bought reported that Reid had taken his community’s and sold into a possible beast to be feared and protest to Harry H. Tallman, manager of the guarded.” New Grand Theatre. According to the news Dixon’s most popular novel, The Clansman, paper, Reid had found the meeting “satisfac published in 1905, was the basis of the highly tory.” Reid reported that Tallman believed successful film The Birth of a Nation in 1915. that The Clansman “conveyed a moral lesson to His book attempted to prove bestial propen both races and that the public’s conception of it sities of blacks. The character who speaks most is wrong. In Tallman s view, the play’s theme was one of swift punishment of evildoers
SUMMER 1990 77 REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE J N DING DARLING FOUNDATION uiil foundations. judicial 78 paternalistic “thecoloredtone, man could use practiceof“respectable seating local theaters lousseats.pricesfor parquet his moneyto advantagebetter thanto pay fabu Butpart Talhnan ofhad his addedintheater. a h bak a nes’ e odme the condemned He needs.’ man black the refusedtosell aticket to colored peoplein any Ding Darling s cartoon of July 28, 190.3. suggests that extralegal methods such as lynching threatened the nation s nation the threatened lynching as such methods extralegal that suggests 190.3. 28, July of cartoon s Darling Ding THEPALIMPSEST R eid responded that “racial thatis dignity respondedReidwhat ts ie o Wee tig uy Uce Toe osWl So B To i o Handle. to Big Too Be Soon Will Boys Those Uncle. Busy, etting G ere W You Time It’s PR TE O AD PI TE CHILD THE SPOIL AND ROD THE SPARE ple sitting beside them be blameless. besittingplethembeside ” willthose who complain of decent colored peo agementwill minimizenot wrong,the neither ly” edcniud “h sn fte man “The sinsof Reidtheplay.” continued, blacktheater-goer“to stay athome,evenif an colored inpeople’Jim Crow sections andpro o e abyoto h tetr H ugd the urged He theater.boycott posedof athe nes eiepopshm towitnesshimpromptsdesirea goodintense Reid asserted, moreover, that even though blacks had been guaranteed the right of cit izenship and a franchise by constitutional amendments, their social equality would only be guaranteed by white acceptance. Dignity could not be revealed from behind a burnt cork mask of minstrel images.
HUS, IN THE YEARS between 1874 and 1910, Sioux City whites accepted the spectrum of black stereotypes per vasive in white America. They viewed blacks ‘ through a glass, darkly, using a lexicon ofT racial vocabulary and notions from a variety of popular entertainment. These plays, min strel shows, novels, and movies supplied, rein forced, and reflected racist portrayals of blacks as inferior to whites physically, intellectually, and temperamentally. However, contrary to attempts by Radicals to violently suppress and eliminate blacks from American society, Mod erates in Sioux Citv foresaw continued accom- modation with blacks. Yet as the Radical images of blacks became more stridently nega tive and pervasive in local popular entertain Sioux City minister J. Cornelius Reid called for “racial ment, it remained to be seen if the Moderate dignity” in his protest against segregated seating and consensus in Sioux City would prevail. □ dramatizations of racist novels by Thomas Dixon.
NOTE ON SOURCES Sioux City’s two leading newspapers of the Progressive (1984); Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Era were the Sioux City Journal and the Sioux City Daily Harlem Renaissance (1987); and Margaret Just Butcher, Times. Useful sources about black Americans include: C. The Negro in American Culture (1956) Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd David L. Lendt, Ding: The Life of Jay Norwood Dar rev. ed. (1974), Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: ling (1979); Ruth A. Gallaher, J.N Ding,’ Palimpsest, 11 Black-White Relations in the American South Since (Nov. 1930), 499-514; David L Lendt, J.N. ‘Ding’ Dar Emancipation (1984), especially Part 3, ‘The North and ling: The Formative Years,’ Annals of Iowa, 45 (Fall The Negro”; David Gordon Nielson, Black Ethos: North 1979), 135-46; Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben ern Urban Negro Life and Thought, 1890-1930 (1977); Tillman: South Carolinian (1944), especially chap. 26, Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and The Negro Issue"; Paul VV. Black, “Lynchings In Iowa,” Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1.900(1954); August Meier and Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 10 (April 1912), Elliott M. Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto: An Inter 151-254; John Hope Franklin, " Birth ofa Nation’—Prop pretive History of American Negroes (1966); Stanley aganda as History,” Massachusetts Review, 20 (Autumn Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks And White Immi 1979); Thomas R. Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to grants Since 1880 (1980); George M. Fredrickson, The the Motion Picture Birth of a Nation," The Historian, 25 Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro- (May 1963), 344-62; Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard’s American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971), Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 chap. 10 “Accommodationist Racism and the Progressive (1902). Mentality”; and I. A. Newby, Jim Crow's Defense: Anti- Dorothv Sch wieder, Joseph Hraba, and Elmer Sch wie Negro Thought In America, 1900-1930 (1965). der provide a good description of an Iowa black commu Lawrence Levine discusses humor as an adjustment to nity in Buxton. Work and Racial Equality in a Coal the harsh reality of life in Jim Crow America in Black Mining Community (1987); see also Leola Nelson Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Bergmann, The Negro in Iowa (1969). A good description Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1978), especially of the “child, ” beast, ” and local-color Negro in another chap. 5, Black Laughter. See also Robert C. Toll, midwestern city with a small black population can be Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century found in James E. DeVries, Race and Kinship in a Mid America (1974), and On With the Show: The First Cen western Town: The Black Experience in Monroe, Michi tura of Show Business in America (1976); William L. Van gan, 1900-1915 (1984). Deburg, Slavery O Race in American Popular Culture
SUMMER 1990 79