Read this article in Spanish here
The pain had turned into Rage, which had unleashed the most violent protests in the United States since 1968 when Martin Luther King died. It is racial segregation, and strangely enough, it may seem there is a dance that tells that story very well. I’m talking about Jump Jim Crow, an interpretation that tells that race struggle that finishes in the origin of blues.
The segregation of African Americans was a bomb that exploded. At the end of the day, those of us who see it from an outsider’s perspective know that violence will never be a way to solve anything. Violence only leads to more violence and increases grudges. However, just like Martin Luther King mentioned in one of his speeches, it is not the same to see it than to live it.
It is possibly easy to say “Wait” for those who never felt the steely darts of segregation firsthand. But when it has been seen how angry crowds lynched mothers and fathers at will, and drowned sisters and brothers on a pure whim; when it has been seen how hateful police insulted ours, how they mistreated and even killed our black brothers and sisters; when most of our twenty million black brothers are seen suffocating in the dungeon of poverty what can’t go to the amusement park recently announced on television and sees how tears come out when he is told that “Wonderland” is forbidden to children of color, and when he observes how the ominous clouds of inferiority begin to muddy his small mental sky, and how he begins to deform his personality giving way to an unconscious resentment towards whites …; when one’s name becomes “nigger” and the middle name becomes “child” (whatever age you are), becoming his last name “John”, both that his wife and mother are denied courtesy treatment “lady” (…) then, and only then, is it understood why we find it so difficult to wait
Martin Luther King Jr., Why we can’t wait, New York, Putnam Signet Classic, 2001. P.69.
And it seems impossible to believe that almost 20 years after it was published, the speech is still alive and more valid than ever. And the peak of this injustice was during what is known as the Jim Crow era of Jim Crow laws, a unique name that comes from a famous dance of 1828. Which was just an excuse to reference a series of rules. Laws that institutionalized racial segregation in the southern states of the United States, protected under the principle of: “Separate but equal,” an irony as great as Jump Jim Crow itself.
It was a performance by Thomas Daddy Rice, a white singer-songwriter, actor, and comedian, who composed the song, representing a black servant who used to dance while brushing his master’s horse. His face was covered with charcoal paste or burnt cork. Around 1850, this character with his face painted black had cruelly become one of the most stereotyped images of the concept of the inferiority of black men in American culture. It was a comic interpretation and with an air of superiority of whites towards the blacks of the time.
The Minstrel, a musical theater genre, was born from the interpretation of the popular character played by Rice. Between 1840 and 1900, whose origin is Jump Jim Crow and is characterized by recreating dances with black music from the plantations of the south of the country. These representations were made by white men who painted their faces black to imitate them. Their only purpose was to expose African American culture.
After the liberation of African Americans from the lock-in of 1865, a series of laws were issued. These new regulations separated African Americans and whites in public establishments and areas of life such as marriage, professions, schools, sports, neighborhoods, churches, cemeteries, universities, taxis, trains, boats, buses, bars, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, drinking fountains, bathrooms, parks, barbershops, circuses, fairs, theaters, cinemas, elevators, libraries, beaches, public telephones, workshops, brothels and even in the rows.
But it wasn’t just a series of laws. Beyond that, it became a lifestyle that still today has repercussions.
Also read from another African repression way in Dancing for surviving
One of the ways African Americans responded to the Jim Crow era was by composing songs with hidden messages of protest against the violation of their rights. They gave voice and identity to their culture through metaphors and double meaning; the waves of migration to the north of the United States gave origin for a new genre, and turned Chicago into the capital of blues. Although blues was a musical genre also stratified by its instruments, the piano’s highest level was the dominant mechanism in blues for times. In most cases, its performers were collectors and farmers of cotton plantations in states such as Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. But today, this musical genre is characterized by the guitar and the banjo or violin. If you want to learn more about African American culture through dance, I leave you this Stepflix African fusion class so you can live some of the origin of blues.