I am not saying Frankie Manning was an Uncle Tom, I wouldn’t know– I started after his passing remember –but how we talk about him follows both of these tropes. It’s a derogatory name, a character, and a trope with many different ways of using it. More about the Magical Negro troupe a bit later, but Uncle Tom is a lot of things. I can feel the discomfort and or anger from most readers, from here, but hear me out. There are two tropes for Black people that I was warily starting to notice and a general vibe I didn’t notice until much later. Having started a few years after his death, I could only learn of him through the stories, and the stories made me a bit uncomfortable. To my eyes, he wasn’t on a whole other level than the other dancers in the video, and honestly, he wasn’t even my favourite. I was confused as to why this guy was the one being so highly upheld. It was as if your closeness to Frankie was a status symbol. People talked about him as though he was a magical figure. It was then that I started hearing the talk about Frankie. When I watched the Hellzapoppin’video as a young dancer I recall being mostly focused on trying to figure out why their dancing looked so different than what I saw around me and… a discomfort with the costumes. Frankie signing copies of his autobiography.
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