Minstrelsy began to play quite a part in the entertainment of all Americans.
And it wasn't all pernicious. Some of it was good humor and appreciated, I
suppose, by both groups. But it also was pernicious because it had the impact
of creating in the minds of newcoming whites the otherness of African Americans
and then they became increasingly the measuring stick, negatively, of what
citizenship was all about. And so to be an American became increasingly less
and less to be an American who might be an African American, but someone who
was distanced from the African American. Minstrelsy played their part, but, on
the other hand, of course the music of the period is heavily contributed to by
African Americans. Paul Lawrence, in addition to his poetry and his novels, is
writing a wonderful musical, "Chlorindi", the origins of the cakewalk with
Rosemond Johnson, the brother of James Weldon Johnson. There are other
light operas, as they were coming to be called, that were being written by
Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson which were to be really the grist of
the Broadway musicals about to come. That's very important. I might mention,
in terms of attitudes what people felt to African Americans, it is in 1900,
since we're talking about music, that one of the most ah electric pieces of
music in the African American experience is composed, "Lift Every Voice and
Sing", in 1900 by James Weldon and Rosemond Johnson. And that will soon be
called the Negro National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing, lift every voice
and sing to Earth and Heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty. Let our
rejoicing rise high as the highest skies. We shall walk on into glorious
liberty," or something like that. It was really quite stirring and I think it
reflected that obdurate optimism that continued over against this dismal
backdrop of lynching and white supremacy and poverty and the rest of it that
we've been talking about. Indeed, that that anthem will be of a piece with a
new term that just begins to begin to be uttered, the "new negro".
I suppose African Americans thought that they were marching into the 20th
century with, at the end of that century, full citizenship in the most complete
sense as a given. I think if they were to see 1999 with a deficiencies, they
would have been absolutely incredulous, all the progress that has been made. I
think their optimism is such that they would have said that far more would have
been made. The optimism, despite the realities of the situation, is, I think,
the signature of 1900 for African Americans.
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