Categories: Articles, Hazel Rosetta Smith,
Names matter when they deny the rights of others. If you do not believe names matter or there is no power in a name, look at the history of Jim Crow, a fictitious character created by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white stage actor in the 1830s.
According to accounts, Rice had observed traditional black songs and dances in his travels through the southern slave states. In one of the towns, Rice watched an elderly Black man performing a song and prance routine for his own amusement as he was cleaning a stable.
Rice studied the man, learned to imitate his every move, and with extreme exaggerations added, he took his choreographed comedic characterization to the stage. As the story was told, Crow was a white man who owned the Black man and the stable and Jim was the name Thomas Rice gave to the Black man to amuse his white audiences.
The highlight of the staged performance by Rice gave credence through entertainment to racist stereotypes of Black people. His success helped popularize the use of the blackface minstrel format.
Additionally, whites began using the name Jim Crow as a derogatory term on and off stage to describe Black people as buffoons and slow-witted. The slanderous demeaning insinuations aided in the spread of racist overtones North and South in the United States.
After slavery was abolished and minstrel shows began to slowly fade in popularity, the Jim Crow character lived on as a label and a symbol of what southern whites used as a drawback to a life of respect for Black people, freed or not.
Jim Crow connected again as an asset for the JIM CROW LAWS legalizing segregation in local and state statutes spread around the country. The legal system did not protect Black citizens from white police and judges deciding court cases with the assurance they would be subject to conviction and years of servitude in prisons.
Laws have made changes in systems that we thought would never happen, yet others may never get on the books. We must not forget the humiliation put upon us. Never forget the strength and endurance that our people had to hold onto in the more than four hundred years of cruelty and blatant disregard for human life in the long hard struggle to be free.
May the spirit of our ancestors keep us grounded and committed to teaching our children that they are beautiful, smart, and able to rise to remarkable success and stature.
No, we will not, and we cannot go back. No matter how they try to erase our amazing accomplishments, and ban our stories, we know that America was not great in the years of dehumanization of slaves, or the humiliation of Jim Crow. And still, we rise!
[Hazel Rosetta Smith is a journalist, playwright, and artistic director for Help Somebody Theatrical Ministries, retired former Woman’s Editor and Managing Editor of the New York Beacon. Contact: misshazel@twc.com and www.hazelrosettasmith.com]
