Browse Items (24 total)

This cartoon appeared in the November 2, 1971 issue of the Florida Sentinel Bulletin, an African American newspaper in Tampa. The artist’s depiction of an African American family watching a white family on television highlights the political…

The Circuit and politics were linked in African American communities and existed side-by-side on newspaper pages. Comedians performed regularly on the Circuit. This ad promotes comedian Slappy White, who later appeared on Sanford and Son and other…

Performance and politics meet in two ways in this 1971 photo, as “Daddy Twofoot” performs for a political rally crowd outside of the Red Bird Café in Tallahassee’s Frenchtown neighborhood. By the 1970s, many artists on the Circuit were overtly…

Reverend C.K. Steele speaks at a rally outside of the Red Bird Café in Tallahassee’s Frenchtown neighborhood in 1971. Reverend Steele was an important leader in the Tallahassee civil rights movement. As head of the Inter-Civic Council, an…

African American performers created Dixieland jazz from the blues and ragtime in the early twentieth century. This 1982 recording of jazz pioneer Ida Goodson demonstrates a transitional style between traditional blues and the more polished jazz style…

Music on the Southern Circuit returned to the grittier roots of the blues with eclectic new styles like boogie-woogie and rhythm & blues in the 1950s. African American popular musicians in the 1950s expressed a new, aggressive stance in keeping with…

The Red Bird Café was situated at the center of the historic Frenchtown neighborhood in Tallahassee throughout the 1960s and 1970s. A popular dance club and bar, the Red Bird Café hosted both local acts and groups touring the Circuit. Activists held…

The blues allowed performers and audiences to criticize racial oppression, working conditions, and other aspects of life in the South. This lyric fragment recorded by Zora Neale Hurston displays a common form of social criticism in blues lyrics.…

Though much of the Circuit remained “underground” throughout the 1960s and 1970s, national and international artists often toured the larger stops in Florida. This promotional billboard advertised an Aretha Franklin performance in Miami’s Overtown…

This photograph shows blues musicians Gabriel Brown and Rochelle French in Eatonville, Florida in 1935. Zora Neale Hurston introduced Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax to Brown. Lomax’s recordings for the Library of Congress led Brown into a…