Covering Niagara: Studies in Local Popular Culture

Entertaining Niagara Falls: Minstrel Shows, Theatres, and Popular Pleasures

ENTERTAINING NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO | Minstrel Shows, Theatres, and Popular Pleasures JOAN NICKS JEANNETTE SLONIOWSKI INTRODUCTION In most studies, the minstrel show, with its complex historical roots, is identified as a quintessentially American popular form. However, in a reviewessay of three studies on minstrelsy, Philip Gura observes that historians “have not taken the time to consider fully the ways in which this popular entertainment spoke to its audiences … [and] how deeply one of its main characteristics , the blackface convention, was embedded in European and American culture generally.” Gura points to the proliferation of minstrelsy outside the United States, and suggests, “We must try to account more thoroughly for minstrelsy’s immense popularity in other countries…. Equally obscure is the subject of the phenomenon’s continuing popularity into later decades and even into our own century” (1999, 614). Gura’s observations raise obvious questions from a Canadian perspective : what of blackface minstrelsy in Canada, and why did it continue here deep into the twentieth century—specifically in Niagara Falls, Ontario, known globally as a popular tourist destination and hardly at all as a community (incorporated as a city in 1904)? Geographically located at the Ontario/New York state border, and not far from Toronto, Niagara Falls was a strategic site for touring blackface comics, part of what Gerald Lenton describes as “small-time” vaudeville that endured into the early twentieth century (1983, 147). In this cross-border community, the ubiquitous stereotypes and practices of blackface minstrelsy persisted in local amateur shows. 285 286 Borderline Matters We approach this study on local amateur minstrel shows in the spirit of W.T. Lhamon Jr., for whom the “job of criticism” is “not to scorn or judge” minstrelsy ’s codes and gestures, “but to find some way … to grasp at their implication ” (1998, 226). Our study inflects Mel Watkins’s notion of tracing “performance genealogies” (1996, x): for our purposes here, to understand the periods, practices, and places of minstrelsy in the local community. Michel de Certeau’s notions of “use” also echo throughout this study (1988, 35)— “use” meaning common community practice where “everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others” (xii). Blackface minstrelsy by white performers thrived on racial poaching in the United States in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century gained popularity as a local practice in Niagara Falls and nearby communities. We argue that, by the 1920s, blackface amateur shows were nurtured in Niagara Falls, Ontario, as if a home-grown form and that the shows functioned as a carnivalesque outlet for the expression of local ambivalence about racial and class issues in an era of increased immigration and economic stress in the community. Local newspaper discourse is key here, promoting public acceptance of blackface in an era when Frank H. Leslie (1876–1969), the entrepreneurial owner-publisher of the Niagara Falls Evening Review—the “dean of this city’s business life” (Feb. 4, 1960)—shaped his paper, and thus readers, with his conservative social views.1 The Review’s coverage played up the civic value and moral rationale of the amateur shows, for a common good as in, for example, the promotion of the Rotary Club’s annual charity minstrel show that urged “citizens … [to] join in the Christian experience” (Nov. 28, 1927, 7). Thus, the newspaper socially “approved” the racial slurs of blackface, leaving audiences to enjoy the carnivalesque disruptions and the musical numbers without being troubled by minstrelsy’s racist codes. ENTERTAINING NIAGARA FALLS The citizens of Niagara Falls enjoyed a variety of entertainment in the early 1900s.2 Baseball, basketball, and hockey competed with live theatre, vaudeville , early films, and concerts for people’s leisure, along with chautauquas and wild west and medicine shows that drew large crowds. Amid such activities, the blackface minstrel show grew to be one of the most common and enduring forms of live entertainment in Niagara Falls and the greater Niagara area. Minstrel shows were performed in any venue that could accommodate performance, whether in vaudeville and movie houses or school gyms, church auditoriums, or community halls. These shows were surprisingly long-lived, lasting until the early 1960s when, according to Niagara Falls performer-producer Bob Lamb, members from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Niagara Falls, New York, visited his group at Christ Anglican Church and asked that their annual minstrel shows—now widely considered...