What is blackface minstrelsy? What is its history and legacy?

Blackface minstrelsy was a popular entertainment of songs, dances, and racist comic routines that portrayed derogatory stereotypes of black Americans. It began sometime in the late 1820s, when the white performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice put burnt cork on his face, dressed himself in rags, and did a shuffle dance while singing Jump Jim Crow, claiming he had copied the routine from a black slave he saw down South. While the first minstrel performers were white men, around 1865, blacks began performing in their own minstrel troupes, also wearing burnt cork and wigs in order to conform to audience expectations. The form dominated the American stage throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continues to haunt American culture into the mid-twentieth century, as the black clown character developed in minstrelsy appeared on stage, film, and television without the exaggerated makeup but preserving its demeaning character traits. In the late 1950s, the civil rights movement took pointed aim at the minstrel clown, replacing the demeaning image it promoted with expressions of black pride. Today, black theatre artists appropriated the minstrel mask for political purposes, using it to challenge racial oppression.