Banished to the Annex: The Catch-22 of Circus Work
- Micah Childress, "Life Beyond the Big Top: African American and Female Circusfolk, 1860-1920"
At the turn of the twentieth century, most Americans celebrated the arrival of a circus. Circus Day had become a local holiday that brought together ethnicities, races, and classes (of both genders) that did not usually assemble at the same place and time. Within the circus itself, however, race and gender provided boundaries and fostered acrimony. The racism and segregation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could be found aboard any circus train and throughout every show lot. African Americans were relegated to certain jobs, segregated within those jobs, and usually paid less than their white counterparts. The show’s scheduled route often took them into areas in which they experienced the racial volatility typical of the era. Although the public perception of circus employment often produced thoughts of travel and fun adventures, African American circusfolk endured harsh treatment, low pay, and vile racism.
Black sideshow bands – first documented in 1881 within Milner Library’s Circus Route Books Digital Collection – were relegated to the circus annex, constrained by compounding layers of liminality. The circus itself was a marginal (albeit culturally significant) stage, literally located at the outskirts of society near the railroads upon which it traveled. Black musicians performed within an additional layer of marginality. Sideshows housed those performers labeled as “exotic,” and musicians were expected to perform as such. This presentation details how Black musicians responded to their forced otherness, highlighting their agency within a confined stage. Through ingenious spectacles, they deployed the marketing of exoticism onto the audience’s desire for the novel and the authentic. Possessing both musical and managerial skills, they utilized their market share to transform themselves from employees to autonomous business owners.
The circus was a microcosm of its surrounding culture, and Black circusmen endured "the restrictive conditions that eventually permeated steel mills and automobile factories" in their strivation to escape Jim Crow in northward movements throughout the Exoduster Movement (~1879) and the Great Migration (~1916-1970). Black sideshow musicians were in the company of other Black circus performers and workers. With the big tent already brimming with blackface, there were three roles available to them in American circuses: ethnic specimen; roustabout; or musician. We see many Black sideshow musicians that afterwards enter the role of devalued, falsely-termed-as-unskilled manual laborer, as evidenced by census records. Not only were they forced into performing the role of the Other on the stage, they were forced into the role of union busters as management weaponized them in their labor tactics to lower wages and job security both under and beyond the big top (Childress, 178).
The first circus that a Black band played with was Sells Bros. We wonder, were the Sells Bros ethical or economical?
