Minstrel show

A popular American stage entertainment of the 19th and early 20th centuries that used blackface performance, music, comedy, and dance to present racist caricatures of Black people.

Blackface: The practice of using makeup to caricature Black people, especially in performance. Darkened makeup was the defining visual convention of early minstrel performance.
Thomas D. Rice: An American actor and dancer associated with the popularization of the Jim Crow character in the 1830s. His blackface performances helped make racial caricature a commercial stage attraction.
Billy Kersands: An African American comedian and singer who became one of the best-known performers in late-19th-century minstrelsy. His career shows how Black artists worked within, and sometimes altered, minstrel conventions.
Ragtime: An American musical style marked by syncopated rhythms, especially prominent from the 1890s into the 1910s. Ragtime developed amid performance circuits that also featured minstrel entertainment.
African Grove Theatre: A Black-owned theater in early-19th-century New York that staged Shakespeare and works by Black playwrights. Its Black-led productions stood apart from the caricatured representation dominant in minstrelsy.
Jim Crow (character): A caricatured Black character created by white performer Thomas D. Rice in the 1830s. This character helped establish the minstrel show's repertoire of racist stock figures.
Virginia Minstrels: A blackface ensemble organized by Dan Emmett that debuted in New York in 1843. Its full-length program helped establish the minstrel show as a distinct theatrical format.
Bert Williams: A Bahamian-American comedian and performer who became a leading Black star in vaudeville and musical theater. His blackface stage career exposed the constraints and contradictions facing Black entertainers.
Stephen Foster: An American songwriter whose songs became widely performed in minstrel shows and other popular venues. His repertoire helped carry minstrelsy's sentimental plantation imagery into popular music.
The Creole Show: A late-19th-century musical revue featuring Black performers and challenging some conventions of blackface minstrelsy. It offered Black women performers a stage distinct from the genre's usual stock roles.

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