SOURCE: Penrod, James H. “Minority Groups in Old Southern Humor.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 22, no. 2 (June 1958): 121-28.

In the following essay, Penrod examines the treatment of African Americans and Native Americans in Southwestern humor literature.

In the generation before the Civil War the school of humorists commonly designated today as the Southwestern yarnspinners wrote incidentally about the Negroes and Indians of their period and their region. The present study is limited to a consideration of the treatment of these two racial groups by nine writers: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph B. Cobb, William T. Thompson, Henry Clay Lewis, Johnson Jones Hooper, Sol Smith, John S. Robb, George W. Harris, and Marcus L. Byrn. It is the contention here that these writers generally presented the folk concept of the Negro and perhaps a lesser known folk concept of the Indian as well. This group emphasized the stereotyped traits which have prevailed...