ABSTRACT
Ernest Hogan, a popular African American minstrel performer from the United States, was visiting Hawaii for a second time to entertain Hawaiian and white audiences once more with his minstrel troupe. Hogan called himself the "unbleached American," clearly a satirical jab at his fellow, black-faced, white vaudeville performers. Then Hogan became the lead actor in the first African American musical on Broadway—Clorindy, or the Origins of the Cakewalk. The most formative origin story of black minstrelsy begins with New York-born Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s, who claimed that after he noticed an old black man dancing on the streets, Rice was inspired to imitate the man's jerky movement while clothed in rags. Nordyke suggests that the decision to exclude African Americans from immigration may have impacted why there was a low count of African Americans in Hawaii during the mid-nineteenth century.
