GLC@Lunch: “Blackface Minstrelsy and the Birth of American Popular Culture: A New History”

K. Stephen Prince (GLC Research Affiliate; Charles Phelps Manship, Jr. Professor of History, Louisiana State University)

The blackface minstrel show was responsible for many of the nineteenth century’s most harmful depictions of African Americans. Performers trafficked in crude dialect, slapstick humor, and dehumanizing depictions of Black animalism and savagery, casting slavery as a benevolent institution and questioning the desirability – even possibility – of Black freedom. Scholars have long recognized the formative role that minstrelsy played in the elaboration of American racial ideologies. But the minstrel show was more than a catalog of harmful stereotypes. It was also a thriving entertainment juggernaut, one that had a permanent foothold in every major American city and stretched from coast to coast. Blackface acts and minstrel stereotypes were endlessly replicated, brought to life nightly in playhouses nationwide, for decades. We cannot fully understand the insidious ideological influence of the minstrel show until we recognize it as a veritable amusement industry and the first truly national form of popular culture.