International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Some International Implications of an Afro-American Theater Collection

Helen A Johnson

The Theatre and Theatre Collections / Le théâtre et les collections de documents

International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts
16th International Congress, London, 9-13 September 1985
Proceedings of the Congress

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des arts du spectacle
16ème Congres Internationale, Londres, 9-13 september 1985
Procès-Verbal

London 1986, pp. 29-34

Part of the excitement derived from excavating the history of Afro-American performers on the stage anywhere in the world is the development of worldwide angles of vision on world cultures and the development of perspectives on such disparate subjects as wars - both political and religious - racial animosities, plagues, and theatrical developments, as all of these were reported as part of day-to-day contemporary events. Thus, international implications are inherent in the very nature of the black performer's recorded experience throughout the world. A collection devoted to documenting this experience, as is the Armstead-Johnson Foundation for Theater Research in New York, is much broader in scope than a narrow examination of whatever is considered black. Another way of saying this is that such a collection is not limited to documenting what is known today as Black Theater.

When the American Civil War ended with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, large numbers of newly freed slaves, as well as other blacks who were already free, began to form genuine negro minstrel companies. It was the 19th century which gave birth to America's first indigenous form of theatrical entertainment, the negro minstrel show, first created by slaves on the plantations and later transferred to theaters throughout the world. Negro minstrelsy was widely imitated and degradingly caricatured both at home and abroad.

The three seminal periods in the development of the American musical theater were, including minstrelsy, the operetta at the turn of the century, and the musical comedy of the 1920s, the period known as the Harlem renaissance. During all three of these periods, influential performers, musicians, acrobats, choreographers, conductors, and others traveled to theaters so widely scattered as Russia, Australia, China, The Phillipines, India, South Africa, and, of course, the British Isles and the Continent.

What, then, are some of the implications of such artistic movement? They include criticism, racial attitudes and treatment, the concern for things American - whether ideas or people, influences of black performers, as well as influences upon them, and especially the enormous amount of information about black performers not available to readers in their own country.

One of the earliest troupes to leave the States came to Liverpool in 1866 from Macon, Georgia, and was known as Sam Hague's Original Georgia Slave Troupe. Hague, a native of Sheffield, England, had gone to the United States before the Civil War as a clog dancer. After a mixture of modest successes and failures, he was traveling with a small white minstrel company of his own when he came upon an organized group of ex-slave entertainers. His expansive claims seem to give him somewhat more credit than he deserves. The company which he claims to have organized appears to have been one put together by the ex-slave Charles Hicks. Hicks, on one of his two tours of Australia and New Zealand, 1877 and 1888, spoke of having been with Hague in England. As yet, however, I have not found his name listed among the principals .. inasmuch as Hague wanted the men to dress as slaves both on and off the stage, as well as work like slaves, there is little wonder that the strong-minded, egocentric Hicks, with his clearly articulated leadership attributes, did not stay with Hague. Consider the fact that Hague's programs boasted of comic Abe Cox singing "The Hen Convention upwards 1000 consecutive nights".

Moreover, Hague's paternalism must surely have been unbearable for peopie so newly independent who were trying to find themselves in an entirely different climate and culture. Something of this is reflected in the attitude expressed in Minstrel Memories, the autobiography of another English minstrel: "All the negroes who wanted to go home he sent back to Georgia at great expense to himself ..." That number could not have been large because seventeen of the original twenty-six are buried in Liverpool, and we can account for at least three more. Harry Reynolds, the author of Minstrel Memories, continues by asserting that "the remaining coloured men in the Company were evidently out to make an impression on the Britisher judging from the pattern and cut of their clothes and their liberal display of jewelry - a tangible proof ... of Sam Hague's liberality. But one sad fact must be related: these poor coloured men, unused to the temptation of our so-called civilization, succumbed, and the fast and dissipated life they led soon thinned their ranks, and notwithstanding the fatherly interest he took in (163) them, Sam Hague lost all control over them and, free from restraint, they soon killed themselves." One is forced to ask if it is really so strange that men from a system of dependency in the heat of South Georgia, thrust into the cold houses of Liverpool, and worked for years without a day off would die early. For the record, one of them, Thomas Dilward, a dwarf known as Japanese Tommy, turned up very much alive in Australia, where he worked both with the Hicks Company and with the white one of Kelly and Leon, after which he returned to England. Moreover, Abe Banks was still with Sam Hague in the early 1880s. However untrue some of the information and assessments are, and however inaccurately some of the attitudes may have been described, they do set up a basis for later comparisons.

From England we move to Australia and New Zealand, which I consider two of the most important areas in the world for excavating detailed information about Afro-American minstrel companies and the individual lives of their members. Because of information which I acquired in both places, I have been able to secure birth and death record which have provided information about which I could not have had even a sense of direction. Here, too, it is possible to discover the truth about the much distorted Australian attitudes toward American negroes. When I first began to tell friends and colleagues that I was going to Australia, not a single person failed to express shock that negroes had ever been allowed in Australia.

The first black company to arrive in Australis was known as The Corbyn Minstrels. They were under the management of Sheridan Corbyn, who was white. Not all black companies had white managers or owners, as we shall see later. The New Castle Herald on December 15, 1876, advertised with an imposed air of astonishment: "The Company, composed of real colored men". The ad notes that the Company was organized in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1872.

The arrival of the Corbyns, however, precipitated a feud of ugly proportions. The Charles Hicks Company of original Georgia minstrels had been scheduled to arrive some months before the Corbyns actually did, but they were delayed. The Corbyns then used much of the same wording of ads produced by the Hicks Company, such as "The King Laugh Makers". When the Hicks Company did arrive, it was highly distressed to find another company apparently trying to mislead the public. Subsequent ads illuminated a word fight about who the original "Georgias", as they were sometimes called, really were. What happened to them is the same that happened to the Christy minstrels: the name was used to depict a form, so that any company, no matter how local or amateur, called itself Christy minstrels. In a similar way, most early negro companies called themselves Georgia minstrels.

Corbyn and his troupe parted company rather quickly, but the Company stayed together under the management of one of its members and continued touring as "The Original Georgia Minstrels". So it was when the Hicks Company first arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1877. Here we see the original wharf area with the King's Wharf on the left and Captain Cook's on the right. After having amazed the onlookers, the men walked to the nearby soldiers' and sailors' hotel, my first clue as to their housing.

It seems appropriate here to answer two questions: how did these ex-slaves get to these countries? and how long did it take them to get there? An answer to the first is that some of the promoters came to the United States to do their own booking. If they liked a company, they would take all of it or as much of it as they could use. Others had agents in the United States to recommend acts to them. The answer to the second is an average of twenty-six days. The personnel usually traveled cabin class on the mail steamers which had contracts for such delivery periods.

Thus far I have highlighted the first three companies of colored minstrels known to have left the United States at the end of the Civil War. A brief word of explanation here about the word colored. This designation grew in popularity when applied to authentic negroes because white minstrels had appropriated every other term used to differentiate or denigrate these Americans of African, as well as other, descent, leaving colored as the only code word for authenticity. I have recorded very few exceptions - two, in fact, to this. In general, the multiple skin colors of negroes were in themselves mystifying to audiences in other countries. The Hicks Company was described in the Sydney Mail (12/22/77) as being made up of mulattoes or people who have some African blood in them. Others commented on the whiteness of most of the women who arrived with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and other later groups. When the Georgia minstrels of the Hicks Company first appeared in Canterbury, New Zealand, The Lyttleton Times (6/20/77) wrote, as many other papers had written, that "the novelty of colour, the news of their success in other parts of the colony, and the tinge of romance about their history, all served to draw an immense crowd to witness the first performance..." To keep the theaters full, however, they had to be good, and they indisputably were. As for their range in color from white to coal black, few in the audience appreciated the irony that in the United States racial designation of the negro was a matter of law, not of appearance.

Because so little is known about the peregrinations of the Afro-American performers, I wish to deal with the three periods, the 19th century, the turn-of-the-century, and the 1920s with capsules of information about some of the people who illustrate these periods most colorfully.

From 1821 to 1823, free blacks in New York had their own theater in which they produced classical tragedies as well as original material. Out of this theater came Ira Aldridge who, as a young boy, came to England in 1824. He subsequently became established throughout Europe as a noted actor, not only in the British Isles and Western Europe but in such unexpected places as Russia and Poland as well. He died suddenly in 1867 in Poland, where I photographed his grave, and this Summer I did further research on him in Leningrad and Moscow.

At the turn of the century, a show written and performed by Afro-Americans, In Dahomey, an operetta, came to London from New York in 1903 and played at the Shaftesbury Theatre for almost a year. Here we see cakewalkers at the Grand Ball on the stage at the Shaftesbury. At the end of the run, many of the performers created their own teams and individual acts and traveled imaginatively. One of them was Olga Burgoyne who, with her partner, Usher Watts, formed the Duo Eclatant. Burgoyne was not only an entertainer in Russia, but a business woman as well. She was the owner of the Maison Creole, an elegant shop for women in St Petersburg. She operated it until the war began while she was taking the baths in Austria. She returned to the United States where she died in 1973, after a career on the stage and in films, which included teaching Russian dances to American dancers.

One of the most remarkable leaders, who was an equally remarkable basso profundo, was Orpheus M. McAdoo, an educated man from Virginia. McAdoo first went to England, Australia, and New Zealand with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Altogether he made four tours of the last two countries, but after the first one, he organized his own companies. Perhaps the most surprising thing about his travels is that he made two tours of South Africa (1892 and 1898), where the members of his Company were treated as part-time whites. Such status did not extend to marriage, however; when McAdoo wanted to marry his beautiful lady tenor, Mattie Allen, he was told that negroes did not get married, and that it would take an Act of the Legislature to enable him to do so. He did marry her, however, under the banns of the Church of England. They had a baby boy who is buried in South Africa. The amazement about color appears once more as a newspaper in Gunnedah noted "the appearance of three ladies [including the wife], apparently pure white: but we have it on the authority of the manager - and there is no reason to doubt his veracity - that these ladies are all daughters of colored persons, formerly slaves, and were bred and born in the Southern States, 'the white blood' being mixed for generations". The reason given for the McAdoo presence in South Africa appeared in the Tasmanian News (2/22/92): "We arrived in Cape Town from London on May 28, 1890, when I was informed by Mr Seymour Foot, Private Secretary to the Governor of Cape Colony, that His Excellency was extremely pleased to welcome us to South Africa, as the fact that we were intelligent and educated persons of color would materially assist him in the betterment of the native population in which he took the greatest interest." The footnote to the McAdoo capsule is that he had selected the son of a native Wesleyan Minister to send to Hampton Institute in Virginia, McAdoo's own Alma Mater, to be educated. After leaving the ship at Southampton, Titus M. Bongwe was depacitated by a train accident near Taunton.

An additional bit of slave dance influence shows up in this South African cake walk card. The cake walk was a satirical dance created by the slaves who observed the strutting postures of the guests at the grand balls. At their cabin frolics, they awarded a cake to the couple whose steps were most successfully exaggerated.

Other evidence of the turn of the century popularity of the cake walk exists in these postcards. All cake walkers were elegantly dressed just as their models, the ladies and gentlemen at the balls, were. Such postcards as these printed in France in the 1920s reflect the sustained interest abroad, particularly with children who were used to strengthen various adult acts.

One other person who cannot be ignored is Robert Bradford Williams, born three years before emancipation in Georgia. He graduated from Yale in 1885, and from 1886 to 1889 travelled in England, Australia and New Zealand with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. During this period he studied law and was admitted to practice in New Zealand in 1889, and was a lawyer in Wellington until 1910, and then elsewhere. Listed among his credits are his Judgeship and his being the Mayor of a suburb of Wellington. His granddaughter and great-grandchildren still live in New Zealand. The essence of this is that not only did performers go abroad, not only did some of them never return to the States, but the record shows that those who did stay often became not only useful but important members of their adopted countries. Robert Williams died in New Zealand in 1942, having lived through all three of the periods with which this paper is concerned, keeping his musical career alive all the while.

During the 1920s, virtual colonies of Afro-Americans developed in London and Paris. They included classical musical artists such as Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes, as well as popular entertainers and, of course, musicians. Major black shows were imported from New York, such as From Dover Street to Dixie. The Dover Street part was English and starred Stanley Lupino in an adaptation of The Beggar's Opera. The second half, starring Florence Mills, was The Plantation Revue in which she had starred for Lew Leslie in New York, Later she returned to both Paris and London in Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1927. Shown here are her phonetic French lyrics for "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird", and her funeral crowd in Harlem.

As we near the end of this presentation, I wish to show you some other very important people in different parts of the world at different times.
 

Finally, we have seen that the circumstances of birth or conditions of servitude under American slavery did not prevent the talented people we have showcased in this paper from rising above them to become not only superior entertainers but highly successful human beings. Moreover, the collection of the Armstead-Johnson Foundation for Theater Research illuminates a most important fact. Because Europeans did not begin their assessments with the racial contempt which many Americans did, the European's genuine interest in the romance of the origins of the performers has provided a legacy of immeasurable value with international implications dramatically broad in scope. The angles of vision developed from the exploration of this legacy are indeed world-wide.

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