©2019 by John LaTorre
In the early 1970s, I was working at a print shop in Baltimore, Maryland when an elderly gentleman came in asked us to print some copies of a children’s book he was publishing. The book’s title was Jocko: A Legend of the American Revolution, and told a story that I had never heard before.
Briefly, the story was
about the origin of “Jocko,” the statue of a lawn jockey that was a common
sight in the area in the last century. Rather than exemplifying a racist past,
the book asserted, the statue memorialized a heroic volunteer who died during
the Revolutionary War. He is said to have frozen to death while tending George
Washington’s horses, and the good general decreed that a statue of the boy be
erected at Mount Vernon, after which (as the story goes) it was copied by
people who wanted to emulate our first President.
The man’s name, I learned, was Earl Kroger, Sr. I don’t know
where he got the story and, apparently, neither did anybody else. He might have
made it up of whole cloth, in an attempt to “repurpose” a racist image into one
that African-American children could take pride in. While there have been
efforts to trace the story’s origins, no evidence of its existence has surfaced
from the records of Mount Vernon or in contemporary accounts. But that hasn’t
stopped the story from spreading.
I was reminded of the book after the controversy erupted
about a picture of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam taken during his college
days. It showed two people, one in a hooded robe like the one used by the Ku
Klux Klan and the other in a classic stereotyped blackface entertainer costume.
The latter was presumed to be Northam, and there were calls for him to resign
in the interests of cultural sensitivity.
It’s hard for people today to imagine just how prevalent
these racist stereotypes were in that part of the country at that point in
time, and how little attention they received. I’d lived in Maryland from 1952
to 1957, in Virginia from 1962 to 1964, and again in Maryland from 1966 to
1978, and I saw a lot of those lawn statues. In those days, “Negroes” were often
depicted in drawings as black-skinned creatures with thick red lips, huge
teeth, and googly eyes -- not only in
print, but in much of the animated art of the first half of the twentieth
century. These cartoons were short subjects preceding the feature films of the
day, and were later recycled as staples of the cartoons seen on Saturday
morning television in the 1950s, when I first saw them. These caricatures even
appeared in Walt Disney’s classic Fantasia,
originally released in 1940. The sequence accompanying Beethoven’s “Pastoral
Symphony” portrayed black centaurs as nappy-haired “pickaninny” stereotypes
shining the hooves of the white centaurs. (If you don’t remember this scene in
the movie, you probably saw the reissued version of 1990, which panned away
from the black male centaurs to the white female centaurs, or the 1969 version
which deleted the scene altogether, causing a jarring gap in the musical
score.)
This was the world that I grew up in, and that Governor
Northam grew up in. We were so steeped in the culture of the vestiges of white
supremacy that we seldom gave it much thought. There are no non-white faces in
the picture above, of my second-grade class in Bethesda, Maryland. And the high school
I went to in northern Virginia had less than a dozen non-white students out of
maybe fifteen hundred students altogether, and none on the faculty itself. If
I’d been asked to perform in blackface for a school skit, I might have done it,
not because I wished to denigrate blacks but simply because I had been taught
that this was OK in comedy, that it was expected, and that there would never be
repercussions. And back then, it might have been true.
We’ve come a long way since then. Blackface is no longer
considered cool, “Jocko” lawn statues are less common now, and those old
cartoons are seldom seen anymore. Granted, we still have a long way to go. But
by excoriating Governor Northam for what he did over thirty years ago, we are
painting a false view of history, pretending that we were always as tolerant
and open-minded as we are now. But history can’t be so easily edited. Hattie
McDaniel’s Oscar-winning role as “Mammy” will continue to be an integral part
of Gone With the Wind, and Bill
“Bojangles” Robinson’s dance steps will hold up even when his caricatured
costume doesn’t. If we edit out the stereotypes of the era, we also lose those remarkable
performances. Nor will it do for us to re-write history, as Earl Kroger seems
to have done, to make what was once disgraceful now seem heroic. That leads us
down the road of dishonesty already marked by school textbooks that call slaves
“indentured servants” and the Trail of Tears as a “voluntary migration” of
Native Americans.
It would serve us better to admit that, yes, we were once
blind to the issues of race and gender, and that we were doing the best we
could with the culture we had ourselves inherited. Since then, we have learned
what was hateful and insensitive, and taken steps to reduce the influence of
those things and to no longer let them be a part of our culture. We also admit
that sometimes we don’t do a very good job of it, and that there will be things
in our past that we now look upon with repugnance … things that we wish undone.
To be a product of our times is not something we look upon with pride, but
neither should we be ashamed of it unless we continue to perpetuate the evils
of those times. I would even submit that our repudiation of slavery and
genocide and sex discrimination is a sign of hope, because it marks a profound
shift in our culture. If there is opprobrium to be leveled at Governor Northam
and his friend, it should not be at what they did back then, but at whether or
not they regret it now.
I’ve written before about the need for a process of
“reconciliation” for addressing the rising awareness of sexual intimidation and
denigration. (The essay, if you’re interested, can be found at http://jayeltee.blogspot.com/2017/12/blessed-are-merciful.html
) South Africa used this approach to help repair the societal rifts caused by
apartheid. The process of reconciliation acknowledged that there were whites
who had committed crimes against native Africans, but provided a path to
forgive their sins and allow to continue with their lives without further
retribution. It was not a process of exoneration, but of acceptance; these
things happened, and they shouldn’t have happened, but there is no way of
undoing those things. Instead, we consign them to our past, and resolve that we
can live together in a future society where these things won’t happen again.
While the reconciliation process has hit a few bumps and hasn’t pleased
everybody, most South Africans seem to think that it was worth doing.
I see no reason why we can’t extend the same forgiveness to
Governor Northam and all the rest who have sinned against their humanity. If
they have truly renounced the mind-set that prompted them to do these things,
shouldn’t they be allowed to continue to do the good things they are doing now?
We have never expected our political leaders to be saints,
but we can and should expect them to be imperfect humans who strive to reduce
their imperfections and resolve to “sin no more” as Jesus is said to have
commanded. And let us also remember what
Jesus said just before that: “Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.”
Not many of us would qualify for that prerogative, and that’s a good thing; people
who have never sinned probably wouldn’t be much fun to be around. Give me
imperfect people any day, as long as they hold perfection as a goal always to
be aimed for, if not always to be met.
