Springfield, Illinois – A Springfield Man posted a picture on Facebook wearing a blackface and wrote, “Attempting to get the white girls back.” The picture, which has been made public, has been deemed by many people as being racist, inappropriate and as a hate speech.
The man has been identified as Ronald D. Beavers Jr., age 33. At the time of this article, the picture was shared 75 times on facebook with many laughing at the photo and others deeming the photo as racist.
The practice of blackface started around 1830 in New York City and began to be popular among post-Civil War whites. White theater performers would darken their skin with shoe polish, greasepaint or burnt cork and paint on enlarged lips and other exaggerated features. The white theater performers would stereotype black men and women as ignorant, hypersexual, superstitious, and lazy people who were prone to thievery and cowardice.
In 1848, The North Star newspaper reported that abolitionist Fredrick Douglass watched a blackface performance and called the performers “the filthy scum of white society.” Douglass went on to say that the black performers, “have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature … to make money and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.”
According to the University of South Florida Library, one of the most popular blackface characters was “Jump Jim Crow.” “Jump Jim Crow” or “Jim Crow” is a song and dance from 1828 that was done in blackface by performer and playwright Thomas Dartmouth Rice. As part of Rice’s traveling act, he wore a burnt-cork blackface mask and raggedy clothing, spoke in stereotypical black slang and performed a song and dance routine that he said he learned from a slave. The song and dance routine would imitate a slave in an exaggerated and mocking way.
As we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. birthday on Monday January 20, 2020 we must remember in the words of Dr. King, “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” Although Beavers blackface picture was posted on his Facebook page and made public, if it affects one person, then it affects us all.