Minstrelsy In America

With the arrival of minstrelsy in the U.S., a new brand of entertainment infiltrated the stages and screens of antebellum America. As the theatre and film industry caught on to the concept of blackface, Black actors at the time were faced with a dilemma: perpetuate the racial stereotypes that lingered in the smears of cork oil, or be denied the few roles available to Black performers at the time. In this paper, I argue that this choice, while seemingly simple to today 's audience, was further complicated by the social climate of the time as financial and political barriers to success influenced the Black actor to become complicit in their own oppression. Although Black actors benefited financially by performing in blackface, the unpredicted

Those characterizations of Uncle Tom did not come from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom 's Cabin. They in fact came from the images shown in minstrelsy. In Beecher’s book Uncle Tom was somewhat intelligent, however not educated, and was an example of Christian morality. On stage in the minstrel show he became the sniveling black man who was really a coward and was ignorant and somewhat witty in his connection to the all of the slave masters. So that image came totally from minstrelsy, and if we could go down the line and we can surely note other ways in which those images pervaded the society at that time, those were the images, that was the sense of what black people were like”

Lucas’s success in Uncle Tom’s Cabin paved the way for many black actors and actresses such as Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, and Billie Thomas. In 1940, Hattie McDaniel, was the first Black American to win an Oscar for her supporting role as Scarlett O 'Hara 's house servant, Mammy, in Gone with the Wind. Through the mid-1940s, McDaniel appeared in more films, playing roles that members of the post-war progressive black community were beginning to note as insulting. McDaniel had been attacked by the media for taking parts that perpetuated a negative depictions of blacks. She was judged harshly for playing servants and slaves who were seemingly content to retain their role as such. President Walter White, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pleaded with black actors to stop accepting such stereotypical roles, because he believed they degraded the black community. He also asked multiple movie studios to start writing roles that show blacks as being able to achieve far more than cooking and cleaning for white people (Cripps, 179). McDaniel responded by asserting her right to accept whatever roles she chose. She also said that characters just like Mammy proved themselves as more than just measuring up to their