Blackface Minstrel Entertainment Research Paper

Birth of the Blackface Minstrel Entertainment started in the late 1700s as theater performances created by White authors and actors portraying Black men. Blacks were not permitted by law to participate in these theater shows to correctly represent themselves in lieu of these stereotypes. The creation of this kind of entertainment resulted in the first preconceived image of the black man which was traversed throughout the South, North and much of Europe to many who until that time had ever seen a real black person. This image of the dark face, tattered clothes, drooping swooping exaggerated hunched over dancing and crooning coupled with the comedic broken English became the poster for all black men of that time. The audience loving this kind
Rice’s portrayal of a disfigured dancing shuffling black man lasted from the 1830s to the 1850s, the helped establish the iconic fictional character, Jim Crow as well as, Zip Coon, and Jim Dandy (Pilgrim, 39). The irony is that during that time, the songs and dances of this Jim Crow Jubilee brought mixed races together rather than the later segregation laws would suppress. Spanning the twenty years of blackface, mockingly to what we know today hidden in the very songs and artistry the message resembled not the oppressed but the “working-class integration” (Lhamon, Jr., vii). It would appear that American political law makers “censored” this fact using this term instead to bring about oppressive segregative policies in repealing Black American citizenship and constitutional rights. Nonetheless, the icon was born spawning early theater to blackface throughout the minstrel era, to vaudeville to early American cinema. The minstrel shows – whose performers appeared with faces blackened by sooty burnt-cork makeup – followed an elaborate ritual in their burlesque of Negro life in the Old South. Already well-established before the Civil War, they succeeded in fixing the black man in the American consciousness …” (Leab,