For the past 20 years, historian Rhae Lynn Barnes has dug through the archives of American culture to unearth a buried history that was, only a few generations ago, unavoidable.
Her new book, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, corrects a long-accepted narrative that minstrelsy and blackface performances — which caricatured and mocked Black people and helped perpetuate ugly stereotypes — declined after the Civil War. In fact, she shows, this tradition was taken up by amateur performers and spread into nearly every corner of American cultural life, including in Vermont.
An entire section of her book is devoted to the University of Vermont’s Kake Walk, an annual event that ran until 1969. The gathering, which has roots in slavery, involved a dance competition in which white students would use burnt cork to blacken their faces and dance to a song called “Cotton Babes.” Observers would judge the dancers for their precision and athleticism. Winners were awarded cakes.
“It was the highlight of the university’s social calendar,” Barnes writes. “Nearly every white citizen, organization, and local business in Burlington supported Kake Walk.”
UVM was not alone in participating in what Barnes calls a “craze” of cakewalking performances that spread across university campuses in the 20th century. But it does hold one shameful distinction: UVM’s was the longest-running commercial blackface event on an American college campus.
“Nowhere was this craze more pronounced and more prolonged than at UVM,” Barnes writes.
Barnes, an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University, has garnered national attention with her new book. She recently appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, and a New York Times review called Darkology “a major and thrilling work of American history.” Barnes will speak on Thursday, April 2, at Phoenix Books in Burlington. In advance of the event, she talked to Seven Days about the years of research that culminated in Darkology and what it took for UVM’s Kake Walk to finally come to an end.
Darkology reveals a largely unknown history of the ubiquity of blackface and amateur minstrelsy across America well into the 20th century. Why was this history buried for so long?
There’s a few different reasons. One of them is, ironically, the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Black mothers, at extreme risk to themselves and their children and families, were so successful in teaching America why this was so dangerous and detrimental to Black life that it almost went overboard and not only censored and stopped the mass production of these plays and this print culture but went so far as to stop its history from being taught.
The other reason is: This was one of the No. 1 pastimes in Jim Crow America. And at the time that this was a dominant entertainment form, the libraries in America were also Jim Crow institutions, so there was really no incentive to collect and protect this form that they thought was ephemera.
Those are the two main obstacles of why it was not easy for historians or the average American now to see. But what is shocking is the fact that millions of Americans who are still alive did see these shows constantly in their everyday lives. And so part of the recovery has been trying to not only track down this evidence but also finding people willing to talk about it.
What role did minstrelsy play at college campuses throughout the 20th century?
Colleges both in the North and South through the Civil War were very reliant on either slave labor or the profits of slavery. After the American Civil War, that finance and that free labor disappears, and so there’s sort of a vacuum.
One of the things that college campuses do, very strangely, is, in these primarily all-male and all-white spaces, start to put on minstrel shows where they are imitating and making fun of the actual enslaved people that they personally knew.
They began using blackface minstrel shows as a way to raise money, whether that was to build a building on campus, to fund the athletic department — you name it. Very rapidly, it becomes an annual tradition on many college campuses. It’s hard to find a university that did not have blackface events.
All of the local industry on and around campuses discover that when you host these events and alumni return — whether it’s hotels, restaurants, clothing stores — they also stood to gain a substantial amount of money. So as it grows each year, the finances sort of balloon, and colleges became dependent on and expected revenue from blackface shows to sustain their operations.
You devote an entire section of your book to the University of Vermont, which you describe as having the longest-running commercial blackface event on an American college campus. For 76 years, between 1893 and 1969, UVM’s Kake Walk was officially sanctioned by the university, becoming its largest and most profitable annual event. What did Kake Walk involve?
It develops a unique character at the University of Vermont. Most universities have three-part shows, but UVM’s Kake Walk begins to judge and grade the performance and standardize it.
They have a song called “Cotton Babes,” which was essentially a turn-of-the-20th-century syncopated instrumental song. It’s a little over two minutes, and everybody had to perform to that same song.
They standardized an interesting set of dance moves that I would say is a strange combination of the Rockettes, synchronized skating and ballet. It’s normally a duet between two white men in blackface and sometimes in drag.
There’s often thousands of people in the gymnasium — who are screaming and yelling from the rafters and being very animated — whose responsibility it is with scorecards to judge: How are they kicking? How are they holding their head? Are they synchronized?
What are the historical roots of Kake Walk?
Part of what they’re reenacting is what happened in the slave markets. White people would go to slave markets and examine enslaved people, and they would ask them to kick, to dance, to sing, and they would evaluate them.
And sometimes on plantations, this would become pan-plantation competitions called “cake walks” or “frolics,” where enslaved people were forcibly put into a competition or dance-offs in order to win food. These are people who were on starvation rations, and winning meant a great deal.
At the University of Vermont, the prize was a huge cake. Millions of enslaved people were enslaved in the sugar cultivation industry but were denied any sugar in their diets. They’re primarily eating cornmeal. And so it also, in a very crude way, makes fun of that element of slavery.
Vermont — proudly the first state to abolish slavery upon its founding in 1777 — might seem like a surprising place to hold the distinction of having the longest-running blackface event on a college campus. How did this progressive self-image shape Kake Walk and enable it to endure for so long?
The content of the shows in Vermont are particular because of this legislative and historical self-understanding as a socially progressive place.
A lot of times, the shows are making fun of the South — like Kake Walk skits that include re-creations of the Klan or re-creations of Confederate Army soldiers. So sometimes what they’re actually doing is trying to engage in irony, of making fun of the South in a superior way.
But they’re still doing it by dressing up in blackface and drag in these really ugly, grotesque, uniform ways that no Black human looks like. So it’s complicated in terms of what people thought they were doing versus how it was received by Black students and Black intellectuals in the community who were subjected to it.
And what I mean by “subjected to it” is: They could not escape it, right? The university would shut down classes so that everyone on campus could attend.
How did UVM’s Kake Walk finally come to an end in 1969?
The heroes of this story are a UVM student named Linda Patterson and a [Saint Michael’s College] student named Charlie Titus. They’re the two most vocal students against Kake Walk.
This is after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It’s still happening, and they pretty much go on a teach-in campaign where they’re trying to teach their fellow students in the university about historical empathy, what this was based on and how it made them feel, how it excluded them on campus.
Within a year, they successfully convince and get enough allies on the student body that the student body themselves votes to do away with it.
In popular memory, this is how Kake Walk came to a neat end. But your book describes a terrifying incident that took place the first year it was outlawed, in which hundreds of students decided to hold an unsanctioned Kake Walk anyway, right outside the dorm where Linda Patterson lives. How do you think about what happened that night?
They are trying to essentially racially terrorize and harass Linda. They’re doing it right outside her dorm. She calls Charlie Titus at St. Michael’s, and he, along with many of the Black athletes, get in a car, and they come down to protect her.
They are surprised that a lot of the leadership in the Greek system at UVM argue to them that they wanted to see if they could do a Kake Walk that was not racist and that they meant no harm. But they’re still wearing the costume. They still have the cake. Nothing about it changed. I personally think it’s a cultural hate crime. That’s the only way that I really interpret it.
What’s the lasting legacy of blackface events like Kake Walk, in Vermont and elsewhere?
We have to recognize that they generated astonishing amounts of money and political power and also inequality in the landscape of a place like Burlington.
It would be hard to find families that have been in Burlington for a long time, to go into their homes, and not find something [related to Kake Walk]. I mean, they made blankets, mugs, pendants, Christmas ornaments — you name it. They made it.
There are so many businesses on Church Street who relied on this, and so it is the invisible and hidden tool that increasingly made the scale tilt against Black Americans and really advantage and help white citizens, many of whom did not even realize the ways that they were benefiting from it. ➆
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Dark Truths | A new history book reveals that UVM hosted the longest-running blackface event on a college campus”
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