White Crimes, Black Faces: Criminal Minstrelsy in Jim Crow America

This paper explores the history of what I term “criminal minstrelsy”—the act of white men and women committing crimes and passing themselves off as black while doing so. In the height of America’s Jim Crow era, at least hundreds (almost certainly thousands) of white criminals engaged in criminal minstrelsy. Criminal minstrels animate the research files of some of the era’s most influential social scientists, and worked their way into seminal publications like Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Reports of their deeds appeared in regional black weeklies like the Wichita Negro Starand the Savannah Tribune, prominent black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, andmainstream nation outlets like The New York Times and The Nation. Black novelists wrote about them; civil rights organizations bemoaned them and tried to make their actions federal crimes. Radical black freedom activists like Ida B. Wells criticized them for putting the lives of black people in jeopardy, since they ginned the wrath of white lynch mobs who frothed over fictitious “black” crimes. Criminal minstrels stoked the flames of Chicago’s 1919 race riot, and there were years of speculation that one was responsible for Knoxille’s the same year.

This paper argue for the importance of criminal minstrelsy in better understanding blackface’s social consequences, and to the social constructions of race and crime in the United States. While criminal minstrelsy may seem enigmatic on its face, it is, in reality, a vital piece of history that’s been hiding in plain sight. It ramified in the bodies of lynching victims, inflated black crime statistics, and amplified what Khalil Muhammad has called the “condemnation of blackness” that structured Progressive Era social scientific thought. These acts of racial framing (framing in multiple senses) offer important avenues for thinking about crime, culture, and race in America.