How did blackface minstrelsy begin?
Fath Ruffins: Before the 1830s, when blackface minstrelsy begins formally, African Americans, people whom we today would call African Americans, have been involved in local entertainment. They are the fiddlers at the Virginia reels there, the entertainers in local restaurants and saloons and that kind of thing. But what happens with blackface minstrelsy is that it begins the formal or well-organized entertainment industry in the United States because blackface minstrelsy is created by a small number of people who then begin touring all over the country and indeed to western Europe and to other parts of the world. It becomes the first kind of a national theater or national entertainment that people began to see outside of their local setting. It starts out as a humorous and dance-oriented, music-oriented, joke-oriented variety show, in between other kinds of more formal theatrical acts, but over time minstrelsy becomes itself the entertainment. Dale Cockrell: In probably the summer of 1
