{"id":37500,"date":"2014-09-29T00:15:25","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T00:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37500"},"modified":"2014-09-29T00:15:25","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T00:15:25","slug":"slumming-and-black-and-tan-saloons-racial-intermingling-and-the-challenging-of-color-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37500","title":{"rendered":"Slumming and Black-and-tan Saloons: Racial Intermingling and the Challenging of Color Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slumming and Black-and-tan Saloons: Racial Intermingling and the Challenging of Color Lines<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Researching Greenwich Village History<\/a>
\nCompanion site to Creating Digital History (NYU GA HIST.2033)
\n2011-11-04<\/p>\n

Janice Liao<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The mere mention of saloons immediately conjures images of people satisfying their carnal desires by imbibing large quantities of alcohol amongst a rowdy scene of drunkards. Similar images have been popularized through the slumming accounts of journalists such as Jacob Riis<\/a> and undercover detectives. These stories delivered to a wide range of audiences first hand accounts and initial exposure to an underground world of debauchery and racial intermingling. As a result of journalistic slumming, the black-and-tan saloons became a site of exotic curiosity for distant onlookers to project their imagination, as well as fears. Although there are several accounts that speak of the violence, prostitution and racial intermingling that occur within and surrounding the black-and-tan saloons, the negative casting of these spaces overshadows the community functions saloons fulfilled for ethnic minorities and the working class.<\/p>\n

Black-and-tan saloons, also called black-and-tan dives, is precisely what the name connotes \u2013 an intermixing of the African-Americans and Caucasians, as well as those of mixed heritage and Asian races. Regarded as a \u201clow establishment,\u201d the name was derived from a concert hall that featured \u201cscantily clad African American women dancing for the entertainment of its mostly white customers.\u201d The racially charged term \u201cBlack-and-tan\u201d was used repeatedly in news mediums. Such is the case with Jacob Riis, a muckracker<\/a> journalist and social documentary photographer who spoke of his encounters with black-and-tan saloons in the chapter \u201cThe Color Line in New York,\u201d of his famous book How the Other Half Lives<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe moral turpitude of Thompson Street has been notorious for years, and the mingling of the three elements does not seem to have wrought any change for the better. The border-land where the white and black races meet in common debauch, the aptly-named black-and-tan saloon, has never been debatable ground from a moral stand-point. It has always been the worst of the desperately bad. Than this commingling of the utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black, on such ground, there can be no greater abomination.\u201d…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…These portraits aroused great panic amongst the whites and New York City municipal authorities and urban reformers. They believed that \u201cthe existence of black-and-tan saloons not only permitted racial intermixing, but actively promoted it.\u201d In 1914, a letter from the general secretary of Committee of Fourteen<\/a>, Frederick H. Whitin to Progressive reform photographer Lewis Hine<\/a>, suggested that the black-and-tan saloons were \u201ccatering to not only to whites, as well as blacks, stimulating a mixing of the races.\u201d Chad. H. Heap<\/a> points to the sexual connotation imbued in the language. Latent in the interpretations of black-and-tan saloons are creations of racial binaries; white is emblematic of \u201cpurity\u201d and black as \u201cimmoral.\u201d Thus logic suggests racial intermixing would result in contamination of the white race. To take the metaphor further, Heap suggests that \u201ctan\u201d represents a hybrid of the races, an offspring produced from intermixing.<\/strong> Other racial characterizations of slummers and frequenters of black-and-tan saloons reflected negatively on these ethnically diverse establishments. For instance, black prostitutes were exoticized as being \u201cAmazon-like\u201d in physique and were often blamed for robberies reported by white men. Thus, black women were thought of as being wildly untamed in behavior and deemed as a social threat. Even more dangerous in the mind of reformers was how these saloons encouraged activity that blurred the line between civil activity and acts of indecency that could lead to moral corruption…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slumming and Black-and-tan Saloons: Racial Intermingling and the Challenging of Color Lines Researching Greenwich Village History Companion site to Creating Digital History (NYU GA HIST.2033) 2011-11-04 Janice Liao The mere mention of saloons immediately conjures images of people satisfying their carnal desires by imbibing large quantities of alcohol amongst a rowdy scene of drunkards. Similar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,20],"tags":[17969,17968,17966,17970,17967,596,17965],"class_list":["post-37500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-usa","tag-chad-heap","tag-chad-h-heap","tag-jacob-riis","tag-janice-liao","tag-lewis-hine","tag-new-york-city","tag-researching-greenwich-village-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}