Encyclopedia

This interactive encyclopedia offers teachers and students access to terms, people, and events related to the history of Jim Crow. Many entries include reference material and some of the biographies on prominent figures contain suggestions for teaching as well as links to related sections of this site. The encyclopedia will continue to grow throughout the course of this project.

Zip Dandies: Almost every minstrel show had a black-faced performer dressed in exaggeratedly elegant clothes who carried on with foppish manners. Sometimes called Zip Coon or Jim Dandy, the Zip Dandy performers were usually associated with a stereotypical image of the urban black person. He was dressed in ties and tails with a top hat but had especially deformed physical features such as "beef-steak lips." A favorite scene was "De Colored Fancy Ball" which presented "Dandy Broadway Swells" in skintight "trousaloon," a black or red long-tailed coat with padded shoulders, a fancy ruffled shirt front and collar, white gloves, a jeweled cane, and a long watch chain of gold. The intention was to show how ridiculous blacks could be when they tried to ape the manners of white gentlemen. They were completely self-centered and thought only of courting fancy ladies, wearing fancy clothes, dancing the latest new ballroom jig, and strutting their bodies in ludicrous parodies of what whites believed to be the character of northern, urban blacks in contrast to the Sambo and Coon characters identified with southern, rural blacks.