Bass Hall to Host “Coon”, D.L. Hughley

To our utter embarrassment and shame

The Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall, dubbed the “crown jewel” of Fort Worth, will host comedian D.L. Hughley, star of The Hughleys, on June 16, 2007. In keeping with its tradition, Bass Hall features an African-American entertainment program for the annual Juneteenth Celebration. But this year, the promoters picked a loser.

D.L. Hughley is not well liked in the African-American community, especially after his appearance on the Jay Leno Tonight Show, where he willfully repeated the Imus insult against the Rutgers Women Basketball team. When Hughley blurted out that these were some “nappy headed” women, he caught Leno by surprise. And, the audience booed him instead of rewarding him with laughter. But following in the footsteps of another comic flop, Michael Richards of the “Seinfeld” fame, who unwittingly unleashed a tirade of racial epithets upon two African-American hecklers at the Laugh Factory, Hughley rudely hushed the Leno audience and went on to declare that these were the “ugliest ‘hos” he had ever seen in his life.

How could Bass Hall promoters have missed this national flap stirred up by Hughley? If Bass Hall promoters had known, would they have cancelled his Fort Worth appearance? Would sponsors like the Star-Telegram and American Airlines condone this type of un-funny sexist slur against African-American women? Or, are they looking for some sacrilegious humor on the edge like Hughley’s blasphemous ghetto rendition of Jesus, which is advertised on the Bass Hall website?

Most African-American blogs have branded Hughley a modern day “Coon”, in the tradition of vaudeville blackface comedian of the late 1800s and early 1900s who sold out the image of Negroes to support the white public negative stereotypical images. They portrayed black people as shiftless, lazy, drunkards, and illiterate. They were the highest paid entertainers of their day.



For thirty pieces of silver, blackface entertainers created negative images that African-Americans have been trying to shed for generations. Now the comedian D.L. Hughley is coming to my home town, as if to add a blessing to our Emancipation Day (Juneteenth). Like vaudeville acts before it, this is one comedian that needs to be shown the outskirts of our city limit with a one-way ticket out on a rail.