The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

The name “Jim Crow” comes from a minstrel character played by Thomas D. Rice in the 1830s and 1840s. Even though it is easy to characterize the worst forms of racism as an exclusively southern phenomenon, Rice actually hailed from Manhattan. Although he was not the first white actor to utilize “blackface,” his career skyrocketed when he began painting his face black and playing the role of a likable trickster named Jim Crow. The plays portrayed stereotypes about black intelligence, sexual appetites, contentment under slavery, and obeisance to white people. In the years following the Civil War, as white people scrambled to recover a semblance of the racial order they once knew, they reached back to Rice’s plays and saw them as an apt description of the social conditions of the late nineteenth century.