Lessons in Blackbody Minstrelsy: Old Plantation and the Manufacture of Black Authenticity

Abstract

In 1901, a white theatre director reportedly established an exclusive school to teach 150 African Americans from the South how to perform themselves. His curriculum: the original blackface minstrel act. The report of this school illuminates how minstrelsy not only defined "blackness" but also made it a teachable concept by white Americans.