Racial Framing: Criminal Minstrelsy in Jim Crow America

FAIN: FEL-268149-20

Simon Balto
University of Wisconsin, Madison (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

Research and writing leading to a book on the practice and implications of Jim Crow-era criminal minstrelsy: white criminals donning blackface before committing crimes.

During America’s Jim Crow era, innumerable white criminals donned blackface before going out to commit crimes—a practice I call criminal minstrelsy in reference to the blackface minstrels who inspired their disguises. The practice may seem bizarre, but it had enormous consequences. When criminal minstrels donned their disguise, they were purposefully trying to frame black people for their crimes and often did so successfully. They were also drawing upon larger racist ideas about race and crime—in particular, pseudoscientific theories of African Americans as innately criminally prone. Their actions in turn provoked an array of responses, from NAACP investigations to furious editorials to condemnations by anti-lynching activists who argued that such acts provoked racial violence. This project examines the history of criminal minstrelsy in the United States for the first time, and in so doing offers important new insights about the history of culture, crime, race, and punishment in America.