The second original stock character was referred to as "Ole Zip Coon." Zip Coon was first performed in 1834 by actor George Dixon. He presented a much different blackface impersonation. Rather than being characterized as an unintelligent black slave from the plantation-ridden South, Zip Coon was “northern, urban, a freedman, and a sartorially splendid dandy (1).” The nineteenth-century dandy stereotype had multiple different meanings. In Zip Coon’s case, “The dandy was a composite stereotype drawn from the uncivilized and marginalized characters of the theatrical world itself.” Much like Jim Crow’s opinions, Zip Coon believed in the equality of whites and blacks. Historian Stephen Johnson explained what Zip Coon meant by this in his book Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy: “He suggested that space should be or could be shared with urban, modern whites while reminding them that the plantation were irrevocably in the past (2).” In the song written about him, he goes as far to say that a black man needed to be president:
| “An wen Zip Coon our President shall be |
These ideas made the character of Zip Coon a threat during the fragile era prior to the Civil War. In order to eliminate him as a threat, Zip Coon was susceptible to degrading comedy on the minstrel stage. Thus, the snobby, upper-class air Zip Coon attempted to create was usually met with an underlying sense of irony: "He thought he was as smart as Whites, but his frequent misuse of language and application of warped logic was humorously pathetic (3).”
1) Mahar, William. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. University of Illinois Press, 1999. 202.
2) Johnson, Stephen. Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. 28.
3) Pilgrim, David. "The Coon Caricature." The Coon Caricature. November 25, 2012. http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/1-history/index.html.