Get Out the Way
Likely without knowing it, but also perhaps knowing it at some level in their bones, anti-ICE protesters in San Francisco drew upon a phrase from an old minstrel song as a resource for resistance. “Boom ICE, get out the way!” they chanted in the summer of 2025, summoning from distant, murky, folkloric memory the chorus to “Old Dan Tucker.”
Of course, the more immediate source of their protest chant came from hip hop, with songs such as Ludacris’s “Move Bitch Get Out Da Way,” from 2012. But that phrase, “Get out the way” goes way back, way earlier. Maybe it was speaking through Ludacris and the protesters as much as they were speaking it.
“Get out the way, Old Dan Tucker, you’re too late to git your supper!” That’s the lyric in Dan Emmett’s 1843 sheet music popularization of the song, whose music seems to come from the mists of time, but is likely an amalgam of African American and Scots-Irish origins. Emmett performed the song with the Virginia Minstrels, the group of blackface minstrel performers who made it big with the extremely controversial and problematic racist genre of performance in the 1840s, but Emmett claimed to have written “Old Dan Tucker” in the early 1830s. The song, after Emmett’s popularization, entered into the popular and vernacular imagination, producing myriad variants. Some are racist burlesques, offensive to the core. Others are nonsense children’s songs. Still other versions hint at different sonic, cultural, and political energies. For instance, the Hutchinson Family Singers performed “Get Off the Track!,” an 1844 version with abolitionist lyrics. They also transformed many other minstrel songs into abolitionist anthems.
“Get Off the Track, A Song for Emancipation,” words by Jesse Hutchinson , Jr.; tune “Old Dan Tucker,”; performed by the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1844.“Get out the way!” I always picture the song as an assertion to someone in authority, warning him that his time is coming due. He better watch out. The jig is up. Of course, like any folk song, “Old Dan Tucker” can be deployed in a multitude of ways. It can serve many ends. No matter which one it is, however, from meaningless children’s song to racist minstrel-show satire to working-class swagger to abolitionist anthem to 2025 protest chant, “Old Dan Tucker” is a song about power. The power of nonsense lyrics. The power of protest. The power of being fed up. Get out the way. That’s the message. I always imagine that when the hour got later and the kids were put to bed, audiences in the nineteenth century rhymed Tucker with a different word than supper. One starting with mother. Perhaps.
In the 2025 case, the song’s key line was invoked as a warning. It surfaced to protest ICE and the Trump administration’s outrageous attacks on American public life and civil society, on vulnerable populations, on immigrants and the larger vision of a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural democracy, on freedom itself. It was a chant against all those Old Dan Tuckers who have resurfaced suddenly in American life to think that their supper is always going to show up on the table, prepared by underlings and ready to gobble up. Not so fast, announced the protesters, not right now, and not anymore.
Singing and marching in 2025, their chant reminds us that the American past—even its most vile, racist corners—sometimes gathers other forms, entities, and reverberations. Ghosts can leap out from its dusty cabinets, forgotten bins, and hidden closets in surprising new guises. They can speak old words in new voices, dance old steps in new shoes, occupy new spaces, and echo down new streets. Fresh modes of democratic dissent suddenly seem to appear, as if from nowhere, rough and rowdy and ready for use. Actually, they are always there for the taking, for the making, for invocation, for restaging and repurposing, for announcement of things to come. Just when one might think that the past is worthless in the present, it comes roaring forth again to declare itself. “Get out the way!”
Those protesters remind us that the future is unknown, and who will be left standing—or who one day will have a seat at the table and a place to eat at the feast—remains yet to be determined.
