Rice, T(homas) D(artmouth)

Rice, T(homas) D(artmouth) (1808–60), American vaudeville performer and Negro impersonator, known as ‘Jim Crow’ from the refrain of his most famous song-and-dance act, which he first performed in 1828 in Kentucky. It caught the public fancy and was soon being performed all over the United States. The ‘trucking dance’ with which Rice accompanied the song was an important element in its success, and his decision to perform it in ‘blackface’ led directly to the craze for minstrel shows, though Rice himself never became part of a troupe, preferring to work alone. In 1833 he visited Washington, where the 4-year-old Joseph Jefferson the third, later one of America's finest actors, appeared with him, being tumbled out of a sack at the conclusion of Rice's turn to mimic his song and dance. Rice himself was seen as Jim Crow in London at the Surrey Theatre in 1836, accompanied by a full-scale publicity campaign featuring ‘Jim Crow’ pipes, hats, and cartoons. The name later became a term of reproach applied to subservient Negroes, and was also applied to the racial segregation laws in the American South.