Beyond College Campuses and Public Scandals, a Racist Tradition Lingers

“It wasn’t really a shock,” said Ryan C. Holmes, who is black and who went with 10 other students in protest to that party in 1997. Now an associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students at the University of Miami, Dr. Holmes said that things at many schools had not changed as much as people may want to believe. “It’s gone inside,” he said, “but it exposes itself every once in a while.”

By the late 1980s and 1990s on most campuses, blackface had finally become so taboo as to disappear completely from yearbook pages. When instances of blackface did become public — at an Illinois university in 1988, a high school in Missouri in 1990, a fraternity in Georgia in 1997 — condemnation followed as well as suspensions, firings and elaborate apologies, at least when people felt the need to apologize.

To this day, many white people have bristled at the notion that blackface is inherently racist, arguing that it is a tribute to the person being imitated or, as Robert H. Michel, the Republican from Illinois who served as House minority leader, said in a 1988 interview, “just a part of life” that “was fun.”

In 2008, Mel Kuhn, then the mayor of Arkansas City, Kan., appeared with a darkened face as part of a charity drag show. His character was inspired, he said, by movies like “Big Momma’s House”; The Associated Press reported that the character’s name was “a vulgar reference to female genitalia.”

Mr. Kuhn apologized publicly shortly after the performance after meeting with the N.A.A.C.P., but he sounded a defiant note this week. “There was no insult intended,” he said, adding: “You’ve got to stop this P.C. nonsense, where if I don’t say something perfectly correct, people just get disjointed.”

Thomas Venker, 70, a retired lawyer who is white, was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Georgia State University in Atlanta in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He said the fraternity in those days held a yearly “Soul Review” rush party that featured white members in blackface pretending to be groups like the Temptations and the Four Tops.

“This was because we loved these entertainers,” he said. “The black fraternities would look at our photo album book and laugh at our pictures, and thought it was funny that we would do that, and loved it.”