May 14, 2018 4 min read

Below the Mason-Dixon line, “Negroes” were still being lynched.

Yet, from 1955 until 1961, I and roughly 179 other elementary school kids stood each Friday morning in the vaulted, two-story foyer of our schoolhouse, built in 1895, to participate in choral singing. Accompanied on a seldom-tuned upright piano, we ripped through ditties such as “Scotland’s Burning,” “Yankee Doodle,” “White Choral Bells” and “15 Miles on the Erie Canal.” And, always, “Old Zip Coon.”

Set to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw,” its chorus had us giggling:

“Old Zip Coon is a very fine scholar (repeated three times)

And he sits with his banjo playing coonie in de holler.”

None of us had a clue as to the racist overtones of the word “coon”; Davy Crocket shot ‘coons, that’s all we knew. That our teachers were so naïve, I have a hard time believing. But sing, we did.

Old Zip came back to me two weeks ago when a friend posted to Facebook a picture of a bronze statue of Stephen Collins Foster, unceremoniously standing guard over a Highland Park dog exercise area. The statue was placed there temporarily when it was removed after a 74-year residency outside the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Oakland. Longstanding complaints about the sculpture’s supposed racist overtones gained renewed impetus last year, when American cities began removing statues honoring Confederate Civil War figures. Pittsburgh city art commissioners voted unanimously in October to remove the piece of art by the end of April.

Dedicated in 1900, Guiseppe Moretti’s work depicts Pittsburgh native Foster standing over a banjo-playing black man who sits cross-legged at his feet. Foster is best known as the composer of beloved classics such as “Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair” and “Oh! Susanna.” But his other equally well-known and -loved tunes – “Camptown Races” and, particularly, “My Old Kentucky Home” – depict a white man’s skewed interpretation of black life in the Antebellum American South. His was a view, however, shared by many of Foster’s Caucasian contemporaries that today is perpetuated by woefully myopic whites and, as the comments of Kanye West illustrate, even by some blacks.

Was Foster a racist?

“My Old Kentucky Home” is still traditionally sung at the running of the Kentucky Derby, albeit with sanitized lyrics that expurgate the unfortunate line, “‘Tis summer, the darkies are gay.” Yet, I see no racism in the statue. Though the sculpted Foster towers over the bronze banjoist, he is not belittling or suppressing the man. Rather, I believe, Foster is a musician drawing inspiration from another. Surely this must have been the case, for how else could Foster – who visited the South only once, in 1850 – have developed his admittedly rose-colored view of the South at that time?

I understand why some think the Foster statue and those depicting icons of the Confederacy should not be displayed it public places. But would it not be better to allow them to stand and then make the effort to educate about their inappropriateness? Removing evidence of past transgressions and pretending they never happened does nothing to erase or undo them – it merely makes it that much easier for them to be repeated by the uninformed. For this reason, Germany made the wise decision not to eradicate Nazi concentration camps.

Are we to expurgate every F. Scott Fitzgerald short story where characters refer to “coons” and assume that every black man must be carrying a razor? Must we ban “Porgy and Bess” because Ira Gershwin and librettist DuBose Heyward chose to have them sing in dialect?

Should I pretend never to have delighted in singing “Old Zip Coon”?

Or should I admit it, though sheepishly, then explain why I no longer shall?