ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an historical overview of blackface minstrelsy as it was performed by Black entertainers following the conclusion of the American Civil War. The chapter examines how, from the postbellum minstrel show through to vaudeville, the Black minstrel tradition fulfilled its role of proving minstrelsy's caricatures as founded and true but also how resistance to that role, and to broader forms of racial oppression, was expressed. This was by means of various creative devices rooted in the strategies of survival known to African American culture since the beginnings of slavery. The chapter concludes that the Black minstrel tradition became a form of Black rebellion and the first form of Black public art.
