In Spite of Handicaps: The Disability History of Racial Uplift

In Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro: As Sung at Hampton Institute (1927), R. Nathaniel Dett distinguishes the “old Negro” from the “New Negro” by revisiting the origins of blackface minstrelsy. No good could come of that cultural form’s resilience, the distinguished composer makes clear, least of all for black musicians. Not only were African-American performers forever linked to a debased cultural tradition; they were also made to keep unsavory company. Writing disdainfully of one forbear in particular, Dett complains that “Negro music, at the very outset, made a bad start.”

The singing and dancing in a New Orleans theatre of “Jim Crow,” a Negro folk nonsense-ballad by a Negro cripple who was able to flop himself about the stage in imitation of the motions of a crow, was such an uproarious success that it was imitated throughout the country by “black-face” comedians of both races as a sure-fire hit. Thereby an early tradition of the Negro as essentially a humorous character was established, the effect of which exists to the present day.

(xi)

Dett’s lament is a variation on a common piece of minstrel lore, an account of how vaudevillian T. D. Rice cribbed his genre-defining routine from a disabled slave named Jim Crow.¹ In most versions, “Jumping Jim Crow” is a story about historical authentication and cultural theft. It also consolidates a set of demeaning stage caricatures that would soon saturate racial discourse in the US. Most important for Dett, however, is how this anecdote points up the stigma of disability that US culture attaches to racial difference. Dett’s rendition, in fact, illustrates Douglas Baynton’s influential observation that discrimination against people of color, women, and immigrants has historically been justified by representing these people as disabled (50).

Dett’s purpose, of course, is not to demystify this legacy of subordination by association. But, neither is his invective entirely straightforward, particularly when we consider what it means for Jim Crow to “flop himself about the stage.” And yet to flop also names a nineteenth-century mode of stylized disability performance (Schweik 117). To say that Jim Crow flops is thus at least tacitly to acknowledge the existence of disability culture. And, yet to flop can also mean to bomb on stage or to fake an injury. Dett’s disdain notwithstanding, there is little reason to believe that Jim Crow tanked; his success, after all, was uproarious. That the performer might be faking is a more serious charge. Here, Dett invokes the cultural assumptions that figure disability as a suspect category and every disabled person as a potential sham cripple.² Equally important, this familiar social script also allows Dett to distinguish the “real” New Negro from anything having to do with or created by people with disabilities. To say that Jim Crow flops, in other words, is not necessarily to accuse him of faking disability or even of being a lousy dancer. Rather, Jim Crow’s fraudulence is for Dett that of a disabled black performer claiming a stake in New Negro culture.

The archive of postbellum racial uplift is filled with similar instances of antagonism and refusal. As canonical studies by Kevin Gaines and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham suggest, uplift advocates sought to demonstrate the health and virtue of the black body in ways that left the ableist assumptions of antiblack sentiment largely intact.³ Despite such ambivalence about disability, however, “racial handicap” is a remarkably common locution in the literatures of racial uplift. From Anna Julia Cooper to William Pickens, black writers across the ideological spectrum invoked the handicaps facing African Americans. In What the Negro Thinks (1929), for example, Robert Moton tropes race as disability in order to call for social reform while carefully toeing the Tuskegee line. Among black Americans, Moton observes “an equal determination to see that existing handicaps are not made any heavier, that the field of discrimination is not extended, and that local inconveniences are not in any way increased or strengthened” (237). Textbooks published by the Women’s Council on Home Missions, by contrast, use the...