Black Herman

Benjamin Rucker (1892 - 1934), was born in Amherst, Virginia. He met a white traveling magician, Prince Herman, who taught him magic and eventually took him on as a partner. Rucker learned how to make the "health tonic" they sold as part of the show and how to put on a successful show. When Prince Herman died in 1909, Rucker continued the show and took the name Black Herman, eventually settling in Harlem, New York.

Using a combination of medicine show techniques, references to a fictional childhood in a Zulu tribe in Africa, and a taste for quoting scripture, Rucker found the performance style that worked for him. He let audience members tie him up so he could demonstrate how "If the slave traders tried to take any of my people captive, we would release ourselves using our secret knowledge."

Rucker's work depended on travel from city to city to gain his fan base. When he traveled to northern states, he could perform for a racially mixed audience, which was unheard of for most towns, but in the South, he was heavily subjected to Jim Crow laws and only allowed to perform for blacks. Witnessing segregation, he became an advocate for civil rights and a freedom fighter, holding roundtable meetings at his home in Harlem and planning ways to fight the oppression.

By 1923, Rucker had added "Buried Alive" to his act. At first, he would "hypnotize" a woman and then bury her six feet under for almost six hours as a publicity stunt or part of a carnival. Eventually, he himself was "Buried Alive." A few days before a major performance, Rucker would sell tickets for the public to come to a plot of ground near the theater he called "Black Herman's Private Graveyard". They could view his lifeless body and even check for a pulse—nothing. The audience would then see Black Herman's body placed in a coffin and into the grave. The night of the show, another audience was invited to attend as the body was exhumed. They saw the coffin get dug up, opened, and Rucker would emerge, alive and well. He would then walk to the theater, and the audience usually followed.

In April, 1934, Rucker was performing in Louisville, Kentucky. He collapsed suddenly in the middle of his show and was declared dead of "acute indigestion." The audience didn't believe it. Black Herman had risen from the dead so many times before. The crowd refused to believe that the show was over and stayed in the theater.

Eventually Rucker's body was moved to a funeral home. The crowds followed. Finally, Black Herman's assistant, Washington Reeves, decided "Let's charge admission. That's what he would have done." And they did, to thousands of people. Some people even brought pins to stick in the corpse to prove he was dead. When he was buried, "his death made front page news in black newspapers all over the country."

Source: magicexhibit.org