In the early 1890s a Black Bahamian immigrant named Bert Williams stepped on a California stage for the first time. He wore white gloves, a kinky-haired wig on his head and had burnt cork smeared on his face. This was his first show as part of a group called the Mastodon Minstrels, and it was his first time in blackface. Once onstage the usually charismatic Williams froze; he couldn’t remember his lines. He finally blurted out, “If I says anything, those folks’ll laugh at me” before running offstage, according to his biographer, Camille F. Forbes. The audience, thinking it was part of the show, responded with uproarious cheering. Williams was appalled; he swore off wearing blackface.
Williams would go on to become the world’s first modern Black entertainment star: the first Black recording star, one of cinema’s first Black leading men, the first Black man to star on Broadway. He is one of the pioneers of American entertainment, but is rarely mentioned in the same breaths as the likes of Fanny Brice and W.C. Fields. After all, his claim to fame was that same blackface minstrelsy that he so initially abhorred.
That return to blackface made him a divisive figure in his time. Audiences and critics were left to draw their own conclusions about whether his act aligned with how they believed Blackness should be portrayed.
Williams was born 150 years ago, but the larger implications of his work and legacy remain strikingly relevant. His use of blackface represents an ever-present conflict baked into Black performance: however artfully or meticulously a Black performer may execute his vision on a stage, his Blackness is still redefined according to the context of the political moment and the audience’s preconceived notions of race and identity.
Can stereotypes, tropes, and even slurs be reappropriated? What makes a Black character seem authentic? And what does it mean to make a joke land in mixed company? These aren’t just discussion questions about the career of an entertainer born 150 years ago; they’re the questions that underpin every time a Black performer takes the stage, even today.
Williams only stayed away from blackface for a few years. By 1895 he was performing with George Walker, traveling across the country on the vaudeville circuit. One night in Detroit Williams suddenly decided to return to the blackface that so disgusted him, “just for a lark,” as he later recounted in a 1918 essay “The Comic Side of Trouble,” in American Magazine. He continued, “No one was more surprised than me when it went like a house on fire. Then I began to find myself.”
Williams and Walker billed themselves as “Two Real Coons” — a clever marketing tactic that undermined the performances of the white actors in blackface shucking and jiving. Why would Williams return to blackface? For one, blackface was a tried and true form of entertainment that may have seemed like the singular model of success. But Williams was also attempting an appropriation of blackface, challenging the notion that white men could perform and embody a racist fiction of a Black man, one that was based in their bigotry and fears.
Williams played the Jim Crow figure and Walker was the “Zip Coon” or “Jim Dandy.” Though they took on these stereotype roles, they downplayed the imagined “darky” dialect and the more virulent racist clichés to focus on the odd couple setup of the characters.
Williams welcomed the duality — and the safety — he imagined such a racist caricature afforded him. The “darky” was just a mask; he remained Bert, the bright, well-dressed West Indian actor. He made certain to always maintain a distinction between his persona onstage and his offstage life. Like white minstrels of the time, Williams and Walker put pictures of themselves in tailored suits on their sheet music as a way to show themselves as performers separate from the stereotypes they played.
In 1896 he and Walker moved to New York, where they advocated for Black theater and were themselves pioneers. The two soon staged a successful vaudeville farce called “Sons of Ham,” which was followed by “In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy.” It was the first full-length Black musical to be performed on Broadway, and it was a success. It even toured in England, where Williams and Walker performed at Buckingham Palace for King Edward VII. A New York Times review of the show in 1903 declared that “the Negroes in the audience were in heaven” and the critic praised Williams for his “electric connections with the risibilities of the audience.” “He is of a serious, depressed turn of countenance — dull, but possessing the deep wisdom of his kind,” the writer continued.
Seven years later Williams integrated the Ziegfeld Follies, becoming the first Black performer to star with white performers in a major musical production. His hiring didn’t come without conflict; many in the Follies cast threatened to boycott, and the show faced opposition from the nascent Actors’ Equity Association — for which Williams wasn’t even able to get membership. The theatermaker Florenz Ziegfeld, however, held strong. According to “The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora,” Ziegfeld reportedly said to Williams’s frustrated cast mates, “Go if you want to. I can replace every one of you, except the man you want me to fire.”
So Williams stayed, though this new level of celebrity brought other issues his way. Black critics and journalists lambasted him for allowing himself to be used by the Follies, and for perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
Williams was constantly renegotiating his relationship to his audiences. When he performed for integrated crowds, Williams was confronted with two antithetical sets of expectations regarding “authentic” Blackness: The whites were ready to see him as the bumbling “darky” stereotype while many Blacks hoped to see a version of what the Black theorist Alain Locke deemed the “new Negro,” a successful, self-respecting Black person who rose above such old notions of Blackness.
And when Williams achieved Follies fame, his audience was almost exclusively white, and likely unaware of the nuances he aimed to bring to his blackface minstrelsy. Rather, it seemed as though he were simply accommodating the dehumanizing assumptions they brought with them to the theater.
Williams went on to do more recordings and star in films such as “Darktown Jubilee” in 1914 and “A Natural Born Gambler” in 1916. He was famous, rich and well-regarded. His fans included Ernest Hemingway and Irving Berlin — Berlin served as one of the pallbearers at Williams’s funeral.
Wiliams is most certainly the product of another era, but he isn’t a figure who can be simply forsaken to the past, where his minstrelsy can be elided in favor of other historical Black performances that seemed to more explicitly “elevate the race.” The minstrel tradition still defines, and inspires, a number of modern Black theatrical works, like Dave Harris’s “Tambo & Bones” and Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo.’” And Broadway, though no longer openly segregated, is still dominated by white creatives and white audiences. So every time a Black actor steps on a Broadway stage, there are still vestiges of the same problem Williams faced, with or without the burnt cork — how can one represent their Blackness onstage?
Williams’s final role was in the show “Under the Bamboo Tree.” The show wasn’t doing well, and neither was Williams — during the run his health deteriorated to the point where he could barely dress himself. During a show in Detroit in 1922 pneumonia caught up to him; he struggled through his lines and began sweating profusely.
Even then he was still in blackface. And just like in his first blackface performance roughly 30 years earlier, the audience laughed, thinking his discomfort was part of the entertainment. He collapsed during the show and died the following month.
W.C. Fields, who worked with Williams in the Ziegfeld Follies, famously described Williams as the funniest man he’d ever seen and the saddest man he’d ever known. That description best captures Williams’s contradictory legacy, in which he sought freedom via a mask that was used to confine. He found fantastic success but also bitter criticism, and even when he garnered an audience’s laughs he couldn’t always control where the laughter was targeted. Part of his legacy, with or without burnt cork, is the perennial one of a Black performer, always forced to face an image of himself that may reduce him, dehumanize him. But he still believed in performance — Black performance.
A few months after Williams’s death, in Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World, the Caribbean writer Eric Walrond wrote about the increasing demand for “Negro shows on Broadway,” citing Williams’s role in the shift: “Bert Williams’ tree — to him one of gall — is already beginning to bear fruit, and there is no telling how long the harvest will last.” The harvest has lasted at least this long.
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