Minstrel Shows

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Minstrel Shows

Performances. Minstrel shows, performed by white actors in blackface, were a uniquely American form of entertainment that drew on adaptations and parodies of European American and African American culture displayed through caricatures of Northern and Southern black men. The first recorded example of a white performer borrowing black material dates to 1822, when the Englishman Charles Mathews visited the United States to study African American dialect. Mathews claimed to have seen an audience demand that a black actor, portraying Hamlet, stop in the middle of a soliloquy to sing “Possum up a Gum Tree.” Mathews used the incident in

his blackface act. Similarly, in 1828 Thomas D. Rice, who would become one of the nation’s premier blackface actors, happened to hear an old man singing to himself and dancing awkwardly. The song Rice heard, “Jump Jim Crow,” became a popular standard of minstrelsy and was incorporated into countless minstrel acts in a variety of formats, even working its way into Hamlet’s famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s minstrel acts performed in theaters across the country, usually as part of an evening’s theater program. Mathews, Rice, and other performers, including George Washington Dixon, J. W. Sweeney, George Nichols, and Bob Farrell, made names for themselves as individual acts during these decades.

Troupes. In 1843 a group of white men in blackface calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels performed a complete show (rather than appearing as an introductory act) in New York City. Minstrel groups were soon featured in major New York theaters such as the Chatham, the Bowery, and the Park as well as in P. T. Barnum’s Museum, converted churches and synagogues, touring showboats, and their own theaters, known as Ethiopian Opera Houses. In 1846 E. P. Christy and his Christy Minstrels opened in New York, where they became one of the best-known minstrel troupes in the country. By the 1850s ten major minstrel houses thrived in New York, and three famous troupes played in the same block on Broadway.

Issue of Slavery. Minstrelsy was a way for audiences to work out their feelings about the increasingly sensitive and volatile issues of race and slavery. Blackface sketches and songs portrayed a variety of stereotypical African American characters: trickster slaves cheating their white masters; conceited free Northern blacks; slaves weeping for dead masters; dead slaves mourned by masters; childlike slaves; defiant or abused slaves; and enslaved families destroyed by sale. Significantly, as slavery became a more divisive political issue in the late 1840s and 1850s, minstrel shows ceased to portray any negative aspects of slavery. They focused instead on images of contented slaves and ridiculous freedmen, suggesting that white Northern audiences were more comfortable with racial imagery that played down the evils of slavery.

African American Culture. Although many minstrel performers claimed to have done research in the South for their acts, it is not clear to what extent, if any, their acts represented authentic African American cultures. The line between what these actors assimilated and what they invented remains difficult for historians to draw. In any case the central irony of the minstrel show as the first uniquely American cultural product was that its depiction of the African American man was done in a way that limited or erased his presence. When white actors portrayed black characters, the act of blacking their faces also subtly asserted their whiteness. White actors noted that they often had to prove to their audiences that they were, indeed, white; the rare African American minstrel performers were sometimes criticized for not being black enough (and would occasionally black their faces as well). Christy’s troupe was praised for its authenticity, but in the context of the performance the minstrel’s “authentic” blackness was always meant to be temporary.