Blackface in America: Is it time for Zulu's blackface tradition to end?

The Zulu Parade, a Mardi Gras parade that features both white and black members wearing blackface, recently issued a press release that Zulu marches not with "blackface," but black makeup. NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune Jarvis DeBerry explains his position on the matter:

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The story goes that in 1909 a group of black New Orleans laborers who called themselves “The Tramps” saw a skit at a downtown theater called “There Never Was and Never Will Be a King Like Me.” The Tramps were so amused by that depiction of the Zulu king that they decided to switch up their Mardi Gras tradition and parade as Zulus themselves.

On that Fat Tuesday, the group’s king, William Story, wore tattered pants and a crown he fashioned out of a lard can. He carried a banana stalk as his scepter.


What, exactly, was the joke? Who was being lampooned? The Africans who had established a kingdom on the southern tip of that continent? Rich, white people Uptown who pretended they were royalty and aristocracy every Carnival?

Whatever the joke was and whoever the joke was meant to ridicule, let’s acknowledge this: The monarch with his lard-can crown and raggedy pants couldn’t have imagined that future kings would be invited to stop by Gallier Hall Fat Tuesday mornings to be toasted by the mayor of New Orleans. He couldn’t have imagined that his band of merry-making black laborers would grow to include people of all colors and all walks of life.

If he knew that he was starting a tradition that would endure — this year makes 110 years — would he have kicked things off with a different joke?

Black people in 1909 would have had no reason to believe that Jim Crow would ever end or that integration would ever come. Would the originators of the Zulu parade have painted their faces black if they knew that one day the people thronging the New Orleans streets to see them would include more than working class black people? Would they have painted their faces black if they knew their group would one day include white people who’d do the same?