![]() “It’s really important to look at what people once thought was socially acceptable,” said Sondra Reierson, curator of three-dimensional objects at the Minnesota Historical Society. ![]() We had no idea how cruel, which is why this keeps happening. Minneapolis theaters packed in crowds with minstrel shows, where black characters were punch lines, reduced to degrading caricatures with names like Jim Crow. Sorority girls in blackface giggled together on the pages of old University of Minnesota yearbooks. They had woolly wigs on their heads and black greasepaint on their faces and grass skirts around their waists and they held spears in their hands. Paul, a group of costumed revelers posed for the camera. ![]() The party theme was “southern garden party,” the yearbook reported, and the parents who decorated the gym went all-out: “The men who served the food were also in blackface and costume.”ĭuring the 1916 Winter Carnival in St. ![]() As if Minnesota’s old high school and college yearbooks aren’t full of pictures as awful as the one the governor of Virginia has been trying to explain away for the past week.Īfter the Class of ’52 collected their diplomas at Edina-Morningside High School one spring evening, they headed to the gymnasium, where a uniformed doorman in blackface was waiting to greet them. As if a bunch of white kids from Chaska didn’t show up at a football game last September with their faces painted black. Times have changed, people will tell you. Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe. ![]() We edited most of the N-words out of our nursery rhymes. Those people in blackface, grinning out at us from old yearbooks? That was a different time. People will tell you it’s wrong to judge the past by the standards of the present. ![]()
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