“As Though the Sixties Never Happened”: Newspaper Coverage of a First Amendment Battle over Baltimore's Last Blackface Act

Abstract

This case study examines the 1982 protest of a blackface performance by a white singer—a Baltimore police officer who fought and won a First Amendment battle with the police department over his right to perform Al Jolson tunes in black makeup. How did newspapers treat this episode of blackface performance, and how does this coverage illuminate the dynamics of class, race, and the media in Baltimore in the late twentieth century? This study examines the pages of the Baltimore Afro-American, the city's primary black newspaper, and the Baltimore Sun, the city's mainstream newspaper of record. Whereas the Afro more directly addressed the NAACP's protest of racial representation, both newspapers refrained from commenting editorially on the case until the issue was resolved in the courts. Most notably, Sun coverage evolved from nostalgic profiles of the act before the protest to denouncements of blackface by columnists after the court cases were settled, evidence of the beginning of a broader shift in the representation of race spurred by protests against the newspaper itself. Additionally, this study considers the cultural functions of nostalgia and privilege in alleviating economic anxieties of the white working class during discrete time periods.