REGIONAL – The Newburyport Black History Initiative (NBHI), in celebrating the great liberator, William Lloyd Garrison last week, honored an unsung local heroine who persuaded the school committee in the late 1950s that Black-faced minstrel shows created false stereotypes of black residents.
“This is also a story of an ordinary person’s public bravery and action at the local level to make some change in a complicated world,” city’s senior planner Geordie Vining said of Helen M. Hunt, who died in 1991 at age 80.
A Girl Scout Troop leader, cancer crusader and photographer with her own studio, Hunt was part of the Cousins’ family, which includes Frank Cousins, Jr., a former Newburyport city councilor, legislator, sheriff, chamber of commerce president and now co-chair of the Whittier Vocational High School building committee.
Beginning in the 1830, black minstrels were popular around the country including here in Newburyport, Amesbury and North Shore towns. At blackface minstrel shows in theaters, churches, fraternal orders and schools, white performers wore black makeup with big lips, eyes and wigs, outlandish clothing to dance, play banjos and tambourines and crack often racist jokes, frequently using the N word.
“Blackface minstrelsy provided a standardized set of one-dimensional stereotypes that presented Black people as figures of fun: Comical, frivolous, lazy, ignorant, arrogant, dull-witted, fidgety, servile, superstitious, cowardly, lecherous, prone to thievery,” Vining said.
In a presentation to a packed room at the Newburyport Public Library, Vining said, “Whether well-intentioned or not,” the minstrels created “potent caricatures of Black people.”
In 1959, in the early days of the national civil rights movement, Hunt asked the School Committee to deny a request to allow a Blackfaced Minstrel to be performed in the school auditorium. Considering the popularity of the black-faced minstrels at the time, the committee granted the request, but did not allow the minstrel performers to blacken their faces.
Vining wrote in an email, that Hunt, who was called “Aunt Sister” by the large Cousins’ family, demonstrated the evolution of attitudes about Newburyport race relations. She followed in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass in 1848, who opposed the black-faced minstrels in Virginia, writing: “…the filthy scum of white society…have stolen from us a complexion denied to
them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.”
In researching race relations for the NBHI, which he helped found, Vining said there were “so many old stories in the paper about these blackface minstrel shows, they jumped out at me, including the story of Mrs. Helen M. Hunt standing up publicly to stop them and the newspaper editorials against her.”
Black-faced minstrels in Newburyport and nearby towns focused heavily on Dixie music and romanticized life on plantations with contented slaves. The popularity was also driven by a false impression of the rigid social order in the old Confederacy.
Various organizations staged minstrels in the Newbury Grange Hall, the Rowley VFW and by the Knights of Columbus in Amesbury. The Girl Scouts performed minstrels at the Old South Church and at the Belleville Congregational Church, as well as city hall in Newburyport.
In a 1959 Newburyport Daily News editorial, Ed Plante wrote: “We consider it foolishness… when white people are pressured into believing that a minstrel show is derogatory to all Negroes…. the cause of the Negro can only be harmed by the kind of militancy which rejects the warmth and good humor of a minstrel show.”
Forty-six years later Plante reversed his views on minstrels, writing: “We don’t have minstrel shows anymore, and for good reason.”
Rowley and Ipswich, continued blackface minstrel shows, over some objections, until at least 1965, insisting in Ipswich that “the Negro people should be honored.” In Merrimac, minstrel shows continued until 2004, but minus the blackface and related parody, Vining said.
At the annual Garrison Week presentation this week, a large number of the Cousins’ family, which traces its history in the region more than 150 years, joined the crowd that listened Vining tell Hunt’s story.
The Cousins’ legacy of service to the nation as soldiers, then as public servants is chronicled on one of the permanent signs that the NBHI erected throughout downtown. It stands on Green Street near City Hall.
“One of Mrs. Hunt’s nephews wrote to me,” Vining said. It read, “thank you for your work and honoring our family history…and to our beloved Newburyport. One of her grandsons gave me a big man-hug afterwards, which I loved.” ♦
