Connect with us. It’s a Cakewalk.
Above is a video of a 1902 Cakewalk Performance.
The cakewalk, a dance invented by our enslaved ancestors. was a grand-promenade type of dance, where couples would take turns performing. The couple with the best dancing skills would then "take the cake," an idiom that is still common today. But the cakewalk was more than a recreational dance; it also gave a chance for enslaved people to ridicule those who tyrannized them. The dancers would dress up in their finest clothes and parodied the mannerisms and dancing of the white Southern elite.
(Smithsonian National Museum of American History)