Williams and Walker

Walker, George & Bert Williams. Williams & Walker's Album of Gems. New York: Hurtig & Seamon, [1899?].

Williams, Bert. I Don't Like No Cheap Man. New York (45 E. 20th St., New York): Jos. W. Stern & Co., c1897.

Williams, Bert. Why Don't You Get a Lady of Your Own : The Swell Coon Laughing Success. New York: J.W. Stern, c1898.

Williams, Bert. It Ain't No Use to Sing Dem Songs to Me. New York (Mark Stern Building, 34 E. 21st St., New York): Jos. W. Stern & Co. N.Y., c1902.

Palmer, Jack. Everybody Loves My Baby: But My Baby Don't Love Nobody but Me. New York: Clarence Williams, c1924.

Williams, Bert. You're Gwine to Get Somethin' What You Don't Expect. New York: Leo Feist, c1910.

At the beginning of the 20th century and the era of the “New Negro,” Bert Williams and George Walker founded their theater company, the Williams and Walker Company, alongside progressive innovations in black literature, poetry, and art. Although at first glance the founding of an African American minstrel show seems in direct opposition to the development of the “New Negro,” the two are in fact founded in the same radical spirit of change. Just like the writers, poets and artists of the “New Negro” era, the Williams and Walker Company was a direct product of African American migration from the rural South to the cities of the Northeast. The Williams and Walker Company was not the first African American blackface minstrel company to exist, but it was arguably the first to bring postwar black musical theater that contested the cultural ownership of racial representations to the attention of a white mainstream audience.