Funding for such an organization was hard to come by. I'm sure there was some tax and/or grant money available, but hey, we're talking the 1950s and early 60s here, so people were pretty much left to their own devices.
The marshals had to raise money just like the firemen, and one of the ways they did it was to have a minstrel show every year.
What's that you say, a minstrel show? You mean white folks dressed and made up to look like black folks, cavorting on stage in all their stereotypical glory?
Yes sir, our moms and dads, friends and neighbors would get together and make themselves up in black face and put on an honest to goodness, totally politically incorrect minstrel show.
At the time white people thought nothing of this. Most of them didn't see themselves as racist or harming anyone, they thought that it was all harmless fun making sport of Negroes as they danced and sang and told jokes upon the stage. It was, to them, a re-creation of an American tradition, a legacy passed down by extremely popular entertainers such as Al Jolson, who became famous singing in black face makeup.
So there I'd be, in our school auditorium, where we pledged allegiance to liberty and justice every day watching my mom and our neighbors and our friends from all over town pretend to be funny black people.
It was all there, too. The white interlocutor, or master of ceremonies, would come out and sing the opening song, and then call the proceedings to order with the phrase: "Gentlemen, be seated.", and a semi-circle of white black men would form for joke telling. On either end of "The Line" would be Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, and they would trade off jokes and puns with Mr. Interlocutor in dat broken English we's all bin 'spectin' dem to sez.
There would be huge production numbers with the whole cast singing such songs as "My Old Kentucky Home," "Swanee" and of course, "De Camptown Races":Doo-Dah!
The show was good, too. I mean here were all our friends and families, just amateurs, but they sang and danced with all the talent and professionalism of a show on Broadway. It was all in good fun, but it was all at the expense of others.
This went on for eight or ten years until complaints were made, I presume by the local chapter of the NAACP. This was a shock to the sensibilities of our local minstrel players. Someone actually had the nerve to complain that they didn't like their race being ridiculed on a stage in a public school for all the world to see. The idea that this show could be offensive to anyone never dawned on them. White people were used to getting their way, and now they were being challenged by people who just "didn't know their place."
Anyway, the shows were deemed offensive and of violating the civil rights of others, so the minstrel shows were discontinued. Our local peace officers would obey the law, however grudgingly.
Instead of a minstrel show, there would be a variety show and our friends and neighbors would get up on stage and dance and sing and tell jokes and be just as entertaining as before.
Some would say that it just wasn't the same, that without the black face and the Jim Crow jokes and the southern charm of it all, that the shows lacked a certain luster, that maybe the fire had gone out. But things had to change, the world had to change, and Woodbury Heights had to change along with it, and what we saw up on that stage in those minstrel shows may have been funny and may have been grand, but they were wrong, no matter how well-intentioned.
So the minstrel show was gone and the variety shows went on, and what we saw then were our moms and dads, friends and neighbors, up there on that stage entertaining us as themselves for all the world to see.
Isn't that the way it should have always been?
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