Blackface and the Rise of a Segregated Society

Just a couple years after the Civil War ended in defeat for the Confederacy, UVA students were already busy producing and reproducing an intellectual framework meant to restore the old racial order in the post-war world. Agitated by the “humiliation of living in these days of Conventions and Freedmen’s Bureaus” and complaining about “negrophilism”—their term for attempts to include African Americans in the state constitutional reform process—UVA students wasted no time in creating a popular culture devoted to a return of white rule. They crafted and created stories, poems, songs, and plays meant to bolster the Lost Cause mythology—a post-Civil War, pro-Confederate interpretation of history. In particular, UVA students often focused first on mocking dehumanization of African Americans through blackface minstrelsy and other forms of vicious racist stereotyping as part of ongoing fervid support for a return to white rule in a segregated state.[1]

Student publications from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries are littered with advertisements for plays featuring actors in blackface and traveling minstrel troupes, cartoons mocking African Americans, jokes containing racist dialect and stereotypes of Black men and women, and also essays asserting white rule as the natural and proper state of affairs. Just a passing glance at the yearbook or the newspaper reveals how UVA was an incubator for white supremacist ideology well into the twentieth century. Even the name of the yearbook had a double meaning, referencing both the student vernacular for classroom and examination performance dating back to the 1840s and also referencing blackface minstrel performance.[2]

This collection of UVA student publications focuses on examples of the dehumanization of Black people through various sources: the student newspaper (College Topics/Cavalier Daily), the yearbook (Corks & Curls), and the UVA magazine. We have added a trigger warning over disturbing text and images that will require you to click twice before viewing the source.

If you are interested in learning more about blackface minstrelsy at the University, please see our UVAToday UVA and the History of Race article, “Blackface and the Rise of a Segregated Society.”