Chicago Reader Reporter Gets Bamboozled In Blackface-Themed Hoax

By Jon Graef in News on Dec 21, 2013 5:15PM

A reporter for alt-weekly the Chicago Reader got bamboozled recently in a blackface-related hoax that has to be read to believed.

Aimee Levitt's story, titled "A Tale of Two Minstrel Shows," is worth a look just for the thorough way she documents the history of blackface, ranging from Jewish vaudevillian Al Jolson (who thought "by singing minstrel songs, he was expressing the suffering of both the blacks and the Jews and bringing them together") to Spike Lee's 2000 heartbreaking provocation Bamboozled (the satirical work which kicked off Lee's best decade as a filmmaker, gauntlet thrown) to the more ironic racism of present.

All that alone would make Levitt's story an essential read. But then things get bizarre.

Let's have Levitt set up the scene:

A few weeks ago, the Reader received an e-mailed press release promoting a charity minstrel show at West Chicago Community High School. It was to be an exact re-creation of a charity minstrel show students at the school had put on back in 1930. It was going to fight racism.

"Many people are surprised to learn that overtly racist programs like the minstrel acts actually flourished and found large audiences in the north, in communities like West Chicago," the press release read. "By re­performing this program, the students hope to start a conversation about racial representation and stereotypes. They bravely perform in the uncomfortable guise of blackface."

The show would run one night and one night only, December 21. Admission was $10, and all proceeds would benefit the school's Multicultural Sensitivity Club. Maybelline New York was listed as a corporate sponsor.

Well. You don't get notices about minstrel shows every day.

There's an understatement. Naturally curious to find out more, Levitt got a hold of the press contact, Harry Slater, to try and set up a time to watch rehearsal of the performance. Because she isn't a chump, she talked to academics about the cultural implication of such a performance while she was waiting for Slater to get back to her.

That's when things took a turn for the odd.

Slater got back to me later the next day. Some of his enthusiasm seemed to have evaporated. "We're still working through both the routines and how to best facilitate conversations around this potentially controversial theater performance," he wrote. "So we may not be ready for outside eyes quite yet."

I would be quiet, I assured him. I'd sat in on theater rehearsals before, and knew how to behave.

Slater starts to come up with all sorts of excuses to delay Levitt's visit, which naturally aroused her suspicions. She wasn't alone.

Unsurprisingly, I was not the only reporter interested in this story. Bert Stabler, a freelancer who used to write about fine arts for the Reader before moving over to New City, also pitched it to my editor. He too had enjoyed a lengthy correspondence with Harry Slater, although he was more forthright than I had been about telling Slater that re-creating a minstrel show would probably piss a lot of people off. ...

Stabler was also less trusting than I had been, and he checked the West Chicago High School staff list. There was no Harry Slater. He e-mailed this finding to my editor.

"I feel kind of like I'm acting like a conspiracy theorist," my editor told me, "but what if this is a hoax?"

DUN DUN DUN...

There's more.

I checked the West Chicago High School website. No Harry Slater. No Margaret Nelson, the other teacher mentioned in the press release. No Multicultural Sensitivity Club. No Glee Club. And, if you looked more closely at the 1930 playbill than I had initially . . . the director's name was Harry Slater.

The whole thing was a hoax. There never was a minstrel show. Well, not in 2013 anyway. I e-mailed Slater to let him know I was onto him. He responded with a notice that members of the community had not been very understanding about what he and the students had been trying to accomplish, and the minstrel show had been cancelled. Of course.

I was furious with myself for not catching on sooner, but I was also furious with "Harry Slater" for pulling the hoax in the first place.

But who the fuck was he?

Who the fuck indeed. Well, after double-checking with the school, and finding our Harry Slater was non-existent, Levitt got a tip that the fake bill was from the West Chicago Historical Museum. After further research, she got to her fake Slater: An artist named J. Thomas Pallas.

He works and teaches in Chicago. I wrote to him again at his real e-mail address, and he agreed to meet with me later that afternoon. He was stressed and exhausted, he told me, from having to play the role of "Harry Slater" all week. He was also very sorry he had wasted so much of my time, but it was necessary for his project.

He's an MFA from the University of Chicago. He used a real playbill of a 1930 West Chicago Charity Minstrel Show --- that was a real thing --- and decided to go from there. "I was curious if you could reach the point, while adhering to liberal educational philosophy, to support the activity Harry was proposing. My knee-jerk reaction is 'no,' but what if, by interrogating it, we can support a dialogue?," Pallas told Levitt.

Except for one slight important detail [boldface our touch]:

The glee club that put on the minstrel show in 1930 was not the West Chicago High School Glee Club.

It's listed on the program as the "West Chicago C & N.W. RY Glee Club": The West Chicago Chicago and North Western Railway Glee Club. In other words, these weren't the high school students in the picture Pallas found in the archives. These were adults who worked for the Chicago and North Western Railway who were borrowing the high school auditorium for the evening. The railroad glee club began performing in 1926 and its activities were pretty well documented in local newspapers, including the Tribune, throughout the 30s and 40s. They performed around the city, in contests, at the North Western train station, at the 1933 World's Fair. Their repertoire was mostly light classics, bits from oratorios and operas, and carols at Christmastime. Harry Slater, the director, was also the group's founder. He was not a teacher. He was a machinist, later promoted to foreman. He'd sung most of his life, starting when he was a seven-year-old boy in Leeds, England.

Holy Christ. Where to even begin? A Reader commenter by the handle Eich Dyn put it best:

Since Mr. Pallas would like a public discussion about privilege and racism, I can start off. How about an entire school, whose student body is majority Hispanic, having its reputation degraded because a product of the University of Chicago would like to pad his portfolio? Because the artiste was too lazy to pull a few census records, or even Google "C & N.W. RY," a high school has to waste time and defend its reputation against the unfounded charge that it would be so backwards and insensitive so as to perform a minstrel show.

Here's a more caustic way of putting it, by way of a classic Jim Jarmusch movie.