The Tobacco Festival Unfiltered
Multiracial & Global Intersections Within a White, Rural Tradition
Festival's History
This 1975 program displays the multi-day events and excitement that surrounded the National Tobacco Festival. An annual tradition that brought national media attention to Richmond, Virginia, for a half a century, it amplified and helped cement Richmond’s status as the nation’s “tobacco capital.”
Huge crowds gathered to view performances, watch football games , meet Hollywood stars , join the parade, and enjoy smoking tobacco.
The National Tobacco Festival started in 1935, in South Boston, Virginia, a town at the center of rural tobacco counties that produced the “bright leaf” tobacco in Richmond-made cigarettes. In 1948, the festival moved to Richmond.
The Tobacco Festival focused on commercializing tobacco, establishing rural traditions, and maintaining a predominately white space.
The photograph above shows largely white crowds celebrating Southern parades and pageantry. As floats passed, ecstatic viewers saw the Festival’s reach: businesses, schools, farmers, and tourists with crowds over a hundred thousand.
Representing Race
While presenting itself as a white and rural space, the Festival actually fostered interracial community and promoted a global market. These two white women take tobacco leaves and press them onto their float. The Festival centered itself around tobacco and used the crop to represent small, rural areas.
In reality, the Tobacco Festival was not a solely white space. African American newspapers advertised the events and drew in their communities.
The 1976 photograph above displays African Americans and white individuals taking shelter from the rain. The center African American family stares at the camera along with many white participants. The family belongs here; they do not shy away, but join the Tobacco Festival community.
Beyond crowds, integrated school bands, like the one shown here, also allowed diverse populations to enter the space.
The iconic parade floats featured people of color and represented them in different organizations.
People of color were also featured in pageantry.
The photograph here, entitled "Tobacco Royalty on Parade," refers to the Tobacco “princess,” “queen,” and “the queen's court” who represented their local communities.
The 1960s and 1970s Tobacco Festivals, in particular, also featured mass appropriation of Native American culture through dress, events, and objects.
Children dressed in “native” and pilgrim costumes at the 1964 festival, hold tobacco, while the other child takes leaves, re-imagining a Virginia version of the nation's Thanksgiving fable.
This scene displays how the Tobacco Festival reinforced a mythology.
A Global & Rural Space
Held to Southern beauty standards, tobacco queens, like those featured above, represented communities through their beauty and competed in bathing suit, dancing, and talent contests.
Through their crowning, the tobacco queens were ushered into the light as not only objectified beauty figures, but also global citizens who represented international interests.
In the 1930s, the National Tobacco Festival featured an English knight’s daughter (1936), Cuba's ambassador to Great Britain's daughter (1937), and the Mexican ambassador to the United States' daughter (1938) as tobacco queens.
Here, a woman competing for tobacco queen is pictured. She is posed and dressed (scantily) in ways she would not be allowed to without competing.
Even rural tobacco queens participated in the international markets through their presentation and dress. Featured here, a North Carolinian queen wears a tobacco costume with a Union Jack to persuade Great Britain to reconsider a wartime embargo on American tobacco.
Along with these queens, the Tobacco Festival garnered attention from several domestic and international locations, such as Dublin and London, who covered the festival given its (and tobacco's) growing prominence. Above, a 1940s article from The Richmond Times-Dispatch details national and international coverage.
Unfiltered & Filtered
The National Tobacco Festival emphasized local, rural traditions that sustained white spaces. While the Festival favored a rural mythology, its expansion (much like the tobacco industry) enabled the Festival to become a multiracial as well as global space.
