What a blackface figurine & Chinese pharmacist tell us about Toronto’s past
The archeological dig in a parking lot bordering Armoury St. in downtown Toronto, which began in 2015, was one of the largest such urban projects in Canada. A new book looks at some of the hundreds of thousands of artifacts uncovered and the light they shed on life in the former immigrant neighbourhood known as St. John’s Ward or just The Ward. Here are two slices of life from The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life.
Blackface performers are “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”
– Frederick Douglass
One of the most fascinating artifacts recovered at the Armoury Street Dig is a porcelain figurine about nine centimetres high.
The piece is much worn but depicts a white actor in blackface makeup, playing a mandolin. It is also broken, so there is no maker’s mark evident, but was probably of German manufacture and intended for North American, British, Australian and New Zealand markets. The object is evocative of the minstrel shows that were so popular in the Englishspeaking world starting in the early 19th century. Its discovery in the soils of Lot10, at 35 Centre St., highlights how pervasive the intensely racist minstrel tradition was in Canadian entertainment.
Minstrel shows were born out of racial prejudice. In the 1820s, EuropeanAmerican actors began putting lampblack or burnt cork on their faces and presented themselves as “blackface” performers at circuses and other venues. Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, considered “the father of American minstrelsy,” is believed to have been inspired by an African American with a disability who he observed in Louisville, Ky., in the early 1830s.
The man was sweeping out a stable while singing and dancing with a halting, shuffling step. From this, Rice developed his signature “Jump Jim Crow” songand-dance routine.
The invention of blackface minstrelsy initiated two profoundly discriminatory aspects of American popular culture: the minstrel tradition that turned racist perceptions of Black Americans into figures of fun for the amusement of white audiences; and the identification of the term Jim Crow with African America. So pervasive was the latter that Jim Crow became the common term for racial segregation, culminating in the draconian Jim Crow laws enacted in the last decades of the 19th century. These laws, and their attendant customs, demanded a separation of African Americans from European Americans in nearly every walk of life.
The minstrel tradition combined sentimentality and comedy, ridiculing African Americans and romanticizing plantation slavery. It caricatured both enslaved and free Black people in a series of stock characters that grew more exaggerated over time. Early on, minstrel productions also developed a formulaic structure incorporating song, dance, musical recital, often slapstick comedy, and parodies of well-known theatrical and literary works. Instruments included the bones (a pair of animal bones or wood sticks), banjos, fiddle and tambourine.
By1843, the Christy Minstrels of Buffalo, N.Y., had devised a standard three-act format consisting of the prologue; the second act, a hodgepodge of comic routines and skits known as the “olio”; and the afterword, which usually comprised a one-act musical. This formula influenced minstrel shows for decades. The group’s signature song was “Old Folks at Home,” by Stephen Foster, who also authored such classic works of the era as “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races.”
The Virginia Minstrels, established soon after in New York’s Bowery, were the first such act recorded as caricaturing life on the plantation, turning the cruelty and oppression of agricultural slavery into a comedic medium that undervalued African-American suffering and contradicted abolitionist campaigns to raise awareness about the horrors of the slave condition.
Nor was the appeal of the blackface performance limited to the U.S. Soon after the invention of blackface, travelling players brought the minstrel tradition to Canada, Great Britain and Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, where it proved an enduring form of public amusement. Songs written for minstrel performance, both professional and amateur, were widely published, some of them in Toronto.
Not surprisingly, Toronto’s respectable, hard-working and politically aware African-Canadian population, largely comprised of African-American expatriates, protested such performances. The majority lived in the future St. John’s Ward (known as The Ward by the 1880s). As early as 1840, concerned African Torontonians petitioned city council to stop licensing travelling minstrel shows and circuses — including blackface burlesques — to mount shows within the city limits.
In a series of impassioned appeals to city council, the community representatives complained that the stock characters, and the itinerant groups of actors who played them, were endeavouring “to make the Coloured man appear ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of their audience” and “contaminating the wholesome air of Our City with Yanky (sic) amusement of comic songs known by the name of Jim Crow and Aunt Dinah.”
The first such petition was signed by dozens of the city’s Black male residents. It was presented on July 20, 1840, by Wilson Ruffin Abbott, a tobacconist and real estate investor destined to become the wealthiest African-Canadian resident of the 19th-century city:
“The subscribers of this humble petition represents to his Worship the Mayor and the Corporation, that they have remarked with sorrow that the American Actors who from time to time visit this City, invariably select for performance plays and characters which by turning into ridicule and holding up to contempt the coloured population cause them much heart-burning and lead occasionally to violence ... They therefore respectfully entreat His Worship and all those to whom the right pertains to forbid in future the performance of plays likely to produce a breach of the public peace.”
The 1840 petition fell on deaf ears, so there were annual presentations to Toronto city council over the next three years. However, it was only after a letter, dated April 21, 1843, pointed out that the City of Kingston had already ceased to license these “demeaning” and “insulting” performances that Toronto’s municipal officials followed suit. Apparently preserving the public peace was a factor, since, as Abbott’s fourth petition stated, “certain acts and songs such as Jim Crow and what they call other Negro characters performed by them has heretofore been productive of many broils and suits between the white and coloured inhabitants of this City.”
Toronto’s prohibition against minstrel shows was short-lived. Even venerable literary works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s iconic antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first performed as a play in Toronto in 1853, were recreated as burlesque satires in the minstrel tradition. Minstrelsy turned Stowe’s paternalistic abolitionism on its head and, in the words of Ryerson University visual studies scholar Dr. Cheryl Thompson, “served to reaffirm widely held beliefs about the inferiority of Blacks and the docility of slaves on the Southern plantation.”
A final Toronto petition, dated Aug. 15, 1856, and “praying the Council to prohibit the exhibition of a circus in the city during the current year was presented to Councillor Cameron and read ... passed,” noted on page 568 of the Minutes of City Council for that date.
Newspapers of the day advertised minstrel performances at St. Lawrence Hall, the Amphitheatre, the Royal Lyceum Theatre and other more formal venues, often playing to standing-room-only audiences. Less professional performances were staged in the upper rooms of the city’s hotels, taverns and saloons, at the fairgrounds, racetracks, or in the open air by travelling players. Toronto even produced its own very famous blackface actor, theatre director and composer, Colin “Cool” Burgess, who gained an international reputation and whose songs have entered the North American folk repertoire. Amateur productions employing blackface makeup, minstrel-style clothing, musical performance and song were popular well into the mid-20th century. There were even handbooks published for groups wishing to present their own minstrel shows, as fundraisers by service and professional organizations, school presentations, or variety show entertainments. A photo of the McCormick Playground Minstrels (1916) survives in the collections of the City of Toronto Archives. The Toronto Reference Library has programs for minstrel shows mounted by the Cantanks of the 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade, which they performed while stationed in England in1918, as well as the Toronto Canoe Club Minstrels (1919).
On at least one occasion, a minstrel show was written specifically to denigrate successful and well-regarded members of Toronto’s own Black community. In 1909, the Toronto Press Club put on Uncle Tom’s Taxi-Cabin. Produced in blackface with the enthusiastic support of Telegram newspaper publisher John Ross Robertson, ordinarily a strong advocate of the city’s AfricanCanadian community, the show poked fun both at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, a wellknown, formerly enslaved Toronto couple whom Robertson had personally interviewed in 1888.
Arriving in the city from Kentucky in 1834, the Blackburns had started the city’s first, highly successful, taxi business. With the profits, they supported abolitionism and built a series of homes in St. John’s Ward to provide inexpensive housing for incoming refugees from American slavery. Thornton Blackburn had attained a position of sufficient wealth and respect to be listed as a “Gentleman” in the city’s tax records, and the couple were among the largest AfricanCanadian landowners in The Ward at the time of their deaths in the 1890s. Many members of the Toronto community, white and Black, would have remembered the Blackburns. Yet, this cruel spoof performed at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on June 18 and 19, 1909, attracted large audiences.
The original owner of the porcelain minstrel figure brought to light on Lot10 in the Armoury Street Dig will never be identified. But this single artifact reveals the racial stereotyping and discrimination that Toronto’s early African American immigrants suffered, even after they had reached their new homes on Centre St. And today, however much Canada’s oft-touted multiculturalism policies seek to legislate away prejudice and inequality, descendants of the freedom-seekers continue their long struggle against the ever-present, insidious fact of racism.