The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on Black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around". It was originally a processional partner dance performed with comical formality, and may have developed as a subtle mockery of the mannered dances of white slaveholders.
Following an exhibition of the cakewalk at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the cakewalk was adopted by performers in minstrel shows, where it was danced exclusively by men until the 1890s. At that point, Broadway shows featuring women began to include cakewalks, and grotesque dances became very popular across the country.
The fluid and graceful steps of the dance may have given rise to the colloquialism that something accomplished with ease is a "cakewalk".
As a plantation dance
Firsthand accounts
The cakewalk was influenced by the ring shout, which survived from the 18th into the 20th century. There is extensive first-person testimony from emancipated slaves about the culture and dancing they developed among themselves on the plantations, including the dances that developed into the cakewalk. Louise Jones spoke of "Sech dancin' you never seen before. Slaves would set de flo' in turns, an' do de cakewalk mos' all night." Georgia Baker said that she sang cakewalk songs as a child, and was amused that as an adult, she "would be cakewalkin' to de same song." Estella Jones described nighttime parties with elaborate dress, some of which were attended by the slaveowners, who would judge the dancing and award cakes to the winners.
Secondhand, oral-tradition accounts
James Weldon Johnson, born in 1871, recounted a cakewalk at a ball in his 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
Some secondhand accounts of the cakewalk describe it as a subtle mockery of the formal, mannered dancing practiced by slaveholding whites. The slaves would dress in handed-down finery and comically exaggerate the poised movements of minuets and waltzes. These accounts describe any slaveowners in attendance as unaware that they were being mocked. One man recalled such a dance that his childhood nanny had described to him: "Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better." A 1981 article by Brooke Baldwin concludes that the cakewalk was meant "to satirize the competing culture of supposedly 'superior' whites. Slaveholders were able to dismiss its threat in their own minds by considering it as a simple performance which existed for their own pleasure".
Entertainer Tom Fletcher, born in 1873, wrote in 1954 that his grandparents told him about the chalk-line walk/cakewalk as a child, but had no information about its origins. In their version, "there was no prancing, just a straight walk on a path made by turns and so forth, along which the dancers made their way with a pail of water on their heads. The couple that was the most erect and spilled the least water or no water at all was the winner." He describes it being "revived with fancy steps by Charlie Johnson, a clever eccentric dancer" and becoming known as the "Cake Walk".
Alternative explanations
It has been suggested that the cakewalk originated in Florida, with the war dances of the Seminole Tribe. Ethel L. Urlin, writing in the book Dancing, Ancient and Modern (1912), described these dances as consisting of "wild and hilarious jumping and gyrating, alternating with slow processions in which the dancers walked solemnly in couples," which he believed grew into the cakewalk style. The Encyclopedia of Social Dance echoed this, stating that the dance spread from Florida to Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and eventually New York, with the development of Florida into a winter tourist destination in the 1880s.
The authors of Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance reported that an informal experiment with African dancers undertaken in the 1950s turned up "no worthy African counterpart" to the Cakewalk. The same book noted eyewitness reports of dances from South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria that bore a resemblance to the Cakewalk, with no elaboration.