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

Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin

TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 57, Number 2, Summer 2013 (T218), pp.
102-122 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/508073

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/508073

102
TDR: The Drama Review 57:2 (T218) Summer 2013. ©2013
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In 1901, visitors to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, could pay 10 cents to
watch emancipated slaves and two generations of free-born African Americans reenact scenes of
slavery in an attraction called Old Plantation. This live display was supposed to “amuse and at
the same time instruct” (Ahrhart 1901:42) the visitor about what slave life was like on the “old
plantation befo’ de wah.”1 During the seven-month run of this attraction, the cast numbering
over 150 black performers — touted as “genuine southern darkies” who had “never been north

1. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah,” News (Buffalo, NY), 6 May 1900, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York,
Newspaper Clipping Scrapbook, vol. 5, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Subsequent citations from the
Buffalo News, the Buffalo Courier, the Buffalo Express, and the Commercial Advertiser that indicate a volume num-
ber are from the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, Newspaper Clipping Scrapbook of the Buffalo
and Erie County Public Library; date and volume are specified.

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

Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin

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2. “Slave 96 Years Old,” Courier (Buffalo, NY), 12 May 1901, vol. 10.

3. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah”; “Old Plantation,” Express (Buffalo, NY), 28 July 1901, vol. 15; “Midway in Full
Swing: The Old Plantation,” Express, 19 May 1901, vol. 11; “Midway Negroes Here,” Express, 12 May 1901,
vol. 10.

4. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.”

5. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature: Evolution of the Southern Negro as Planned for Portrayal at the Pan-
American,” Courier, 11 April 1901, vol. 9.

6. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

7. While the primary document uses the term “school,” I add the adjective “minstrel” to further highlight the per-
formance genre this place of instruction upheld.

8. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature”; “Slave 96 Years Old.”

of the Mason and Dixie Line”2 — lived in “real” slave log cabins, picked cotton while singing
work songs, and performed “camp style” meetings and cakewalks for visitors.3

Yet this “veritable glimpse of the Sunny South” reportedly required the creation of a spe-
cial school by a Northern white showman to prepare the black troupe for their performances.4
“The principal of the school,” as a Buffalo newspaper reported,5 was Fred McClellan, a show
business veteran with 18 years of managerial experience, including a five-year stint at Madison
Square Garden in New York City and another five years at Buffalo’s Shea’s Theatre ( Journal of
American Industries [ JAI] 1901a:20). For one month, McClellan taught his “pupils” — “negroes
of all ages, sizes and shades of black” — essential elements of the late-19th-century minstrel
stage. He taught them cakewalks and buck dancing, rehearsed them in singing “negro melodies”
and “camp-meeting songs,” and “prepared [them] to reproduce the Southern negro at work and
at play” for the world’s fair.6

To the modern-day mind, the scenario is outrageous: a white Northerner essentially estab-
lishes a minstrel school 7 (which was located in the South) to teach Southern blacks how to per-
form their “authentic” selves. Although two newspaper articles briefly mention this place of
instruction,8 to date, I have located no archival evidence that confirms the school’s existence
or what took place there. Still, the report — the mere suggestion — of a school may be enough
to establish that minstrelsy had become a legitimate space for defining blackness, despite its
obvious invention by white performers. Unlike earlier forms of blackface minstrelsy in which
white performers such as Thomas Dartmouth (T.D.) Rice took lessons from their black inspi-
rations, the minstrel school suggests both that whites in 1901 possessed knowledge of “authen-
tic black culture” and that real black people somehow had forgotten how to be themselves. At a
time when Jim Crow laws and lynchings were on the rise, these propositions are disturbing and
make the school not so much a performing arts academy as a training ground for black peo-
ple to learn how to embody the type of “darkey” that could be accepted by whites. That type
of “darkey” was a white creation from the minstrel stage, a caricature of black culture that not

Figure 1. (facing page) The front of the Old Plantation concession at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition
in Buffalo, New York. (From Barry 1901; reproduction by permission of the Buffalo & Erie County Public
Library, Buffalo, New York)

Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at
the University of Colorado, Boulder. She writes about, teaches, and creates performance-centered
methodologies of studying the past. She is currently completing two projects: a historical musical about
black performers in the 1901 world’s fair entitled At Buffalo; and a book about the relation between
laughter and the American slave experience, entitled Laughing after Slavery: The Performances and
Times of Laughing Ben Ellington. amma.gharteytagoekootin@colorado.edu

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9. Interestingly, as I was writing this article, Baratunde Thurston published his book How to Be Black (2012).
Though an autobiography and satirical manual, the idea of Thurston’s book speaks to the idea of the ability to
teach blackness that this minstrel school advances.

10. I borrow the concept of “manufactured authenticity” from Sarah E. Lewis (2011).

only came to be known as an accurate representation of black people but also defined and con-
structed blackness itself.

Old Plantation is a compelling case study of an ironic shift in the minstrelsy genre: a per-
formance act that was a conflation of black authenticity and white theatrical construction
was now the basis for a curriculum on how to be black.9 An example of blackbody minstrelsy,
where actual brown bodies replaced a white man’s blackened face, Old Plantation reveals that
McClellan and his fellow white concessionaires successfully manufactured a sense of black
authenticity10 for 1901 viewers, who regarded the attraction as an accurate ethnographic dis-
play of Southern black culture. Old Plantation and the report of a minstrel school demon-
strate not only that “blackness” is performable, as other scholars have long contended (Favor
1999:123; Lott 1993:39), but that it is a construction that can be taught, rehearsed, and directed
by nonblacks.

Lessons from the Minstrel Textbook

Old Plantation followed a specific tradition of previous world’s fair displays under the same
moniker (see Ghartey-Tagoe 2009:175). However, the 1901 display and the idea of a minstrel
school were the inevitable outcome of 80 years of minstrelsy’s illogicality. Though variations on
the history of minstrelsy have been established in contemporary scholarship, even in this special
issue of TDR, a review of one genealogy highlights key developments that led to the creation of
Old Plantation and the reports of its minstrel school.

Early minstrelsy’s goal “was to reproduce the life of the plantation darkey”; one writer even
argued in the late 19th century that this was its “sole excuse for being” (Critic 1884:308). Claims
to accuracy and authenticity undergirded much of the enterprise. Writing of minstrel songs,
J.J. Trux declared that, “the true secret of their favor with the world is to be found in the fact
that they are genuine and real […,] the veritable tunes and words which have lightened the labor
of some weary negro in the cotton fields” (1855:72–73). Minstrelsy’s supposed accurate repre-
sentations of Southern black culture gave countless audience members like Trux the impression
that what was presented was true because “it [was] impossible to counterfeit, or successfully imi-
tate” the original (73).

Yet, blackface minstrelsy was the ultimate counterfeit. Conceived in the minds and through
the bodies of white men, it was the paradoxical conflation of white theatrical construction and
black authenticity. When T.D. Rice created Jim Crow, one of the characters that would make
blackface minstrelsy popular in the 1830s, he ensured that minstrelsy would be an art form that
perpetuated this conflation. An oft-cited Atlantic Monthly tale chronicles how, after “the casual
hearing of a song trolled by a negro stage-driver, lolling lazily on the box of his vehicle” and
after borrowing another slave’s clothes, the “obscure actor” not only “gave origin to a school
of music destined to excel in popularity above all others” but also a theatrical act that blurred
the lines of truth and fiction (Nevin 1867:608–9). From the white blackface minstrel perform-
ers that audiences believed were real African Americans (Lott 1996:8), to the advertisements
and sheet music that featured such descriptors as “negro,” “Ethiopian” and “blackface” to mod-
ify the term “minstrelsy,” blackness was defined by the false face painted in the color of pitch
black, the false dialect, and the false culture that minstrelsy presented onstage. The white the-
atrical construction of blackness quickly became interchangeable with actual black culture and
even actual African Americans. Critics of minstrelsy from mainstream audiences did not argue
that it was ludicrous for white men to imitate plantation slaves, rather they were more adamant

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11. Billing themselves as “real” and “former slaves,” black minstrel acts as early as the 1850s and ’60s (Southern
1996:164) furthered the conflation of black authenticity and white theatrical construction. Also using blackface
and thus presenting “an imitation of an imitation of plantation life of Southern blacks” (Sampson 1980:1; see
also Schroeder 2010:143), these black performers were caught in the quagmire of entrenching the idea that the
blackface minstrel was synonymous with actual African Americans. Many talented black performers turned to the
minstrel stage precisely because, as one black newspaper editor lamented, “The unadulterated negro performer
drives patrons away from [the theatre] house” (“Negro Actors. Some Who Have Been Famous in Great Parts.
Remarkable Prediction Made by a Negro Editor, with Some Remarks on Various Colored Performers,” Courier,
29 November 1894). Thus, by the late 19th century, minstrelsy was the most viable option for a professional per-
formance career (see Toll 1974:195).

that any departures from its authentic black roots derailed the genre from its original goal.
“Without regard to the idiosyncrasies of the negro,” as one critic proclaimed, such departures
were regarded as a “misapprehension” and “perversion” of minstrelsy as an art form (Nevin
1867:611). For minstrelsy to fulfill its claim to be a legitimate representation of authentic black
culture, it had to allow actual black performers to participate in the art form.11

Thus, minstrelsy underwent significant permutations in the late 1880s and ’90s that returned
it to its original goal of reproducing Southern black plantation life. The most formidable were
large-scale plantation productions in which literally hundreds of African American performers
played the part of Southern black slaves (see Webb 2004; Abbott and Seroff [2002] 2009). Also
true to its original conflation of white construction and black authenticity, this form of min-
strelsy had to retain a white presence in some manner to lend legitimacy to both the art form
and its definition of blackness. It did so through white financiers who backed predominantly
black productions, such as Nate Salsbury’s Black America (1895; see Krasner 1997:22; Webb
2004:74–81; Abbott and Seroff [2002] 2009:391–95). The show, which ran during the summer
in Brooklyn, New York, featured 500 African Americans “costumed as they were in plantation
days ‘befo’ de wah,’ and sing[ing] and danc[ing] with as much zest and abandon as they did in
those times, when owned by kind and appreciative masters” (New York Times 1895). Robert Toll
has argued that “the ‘Black America’ show left nowhere else for the plantation-centered black
minstrel show to go. It embodied the ultimate in white fantasies about Southern Negroes and
brought the living proof to Northerners. […I]t symbolized the final culmination of the minstrel
show” (1974:263). Yet six years later, at the nation’s first world’s fair of the 20th century, Old
Plantation not only replicated Black America but proved that the minstrel genre had one more
permutation to make: it would become the curriculum for 20th-century black Southerners to
learn how to be a made-up version of themselves.

World’s Fairs
Where Ethnology Meets Minstrelsy

A world’s fair was the best place for such a permutation to take place. These amalgams of
today’s Disney’s Epcot Center, the Olympics, museums, and technology expos — all within the
boundaries of a temporary city — conflated education and entertainment, reality and theatri-
cal construction. World’s fairs thrived on their ability to transport visitors to idealized worlds
that envisioned the progress and future aspirations of a nation; they were façades of stability and
imaginative possibility that would be swiftly dismantled after a “run” of usually less than a year.
However, the power of their educative effects belied their ephemerality. US president William
McKinley declared that though their “buildings [would] disappear […] their influence [would]
remain” (New York Times 1901).

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these expositions were scheduled virtually each
year across Europe and the United States. In the last quarter of the 19th century, over 100 mil-
lion people (Chappell 2012) entered these spaces of national and cultural comparison to mea-
sure their progress against that of other countries, businesses, scholars, showmen, artists,

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12. The statistic is from “Pan-Am Trivia,” in A Guide to the Pan-Am Grounds, a pamphlet put out by the Buffalo and
Erie County Historical Society [2001?].

13. “The Pan-American Exposition’s History in All Its Stage,” unknown source, 1 May 1900, Pan-American
Exposition Annals: January-May 1901, Taylor Scrapbook, Box 12, Frederic William Taylor Papers, Collection
153, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

14. “Midway at a Cost of $3,000,000: It Will Be the Greatest Amusement Feature Ever Attempted by an
Exposition,” Courier, 24 April 1901, vol. 9.

athletes, and inventors. The 8 million visitors who attended the 1901 Pan-American Exposition
in Buffalo, New York,12 entered a world that was, in the words of Eugene Wright, “at base phil-
osophic, on the surface theatric” (1901:87). Colorful buildings outlined in thousands of electric
lights were devoted to exhibits of the latest technologies, household products, and art, and they
more than fulfilled the exposition directors’ goals of “illustrat[ing] the progress and civilization
of the nations of the Western hemisphere.”13

Also on display were Social Darwinist lessons, fallacies rooted in biological determinism
of white superiority and brown/black inferiority. Historian Robert Rydell has argued that
“no world’s fair was ever more explicitly organized around ethnologically grounded Social
Darwinian ideas about racial hierarchy” than the Pan-American Exposition (1999:143). Indeed,
as he notes, “evolutionary ideas about race and progress dictated the arrangement of buildings,
the selection and placement of sculptural forms, and, above all, the color scheme that gave the
exposition the name ‘Rainbow City’” (1987:127). At the heart of the exposition, “lessons about
racial progress” went beyond the walls of the Department of Ethnology that stood near the
center of the exposition grounds and onto the streets of the Midway, where Old Plantation was
installed (136–37).

As part of the Midway — the entertainment section and the most popular place in the fair —
Old Plantation operated as both amusement and instruction. As a place of amusement, it had
to be a moneymaker and was appropriately considered a concession. As a place of instruction,
Old Plantation was categorized as an ethnological exhibit, one of several “foreign villages
with picturesque types of architecture and the curious and interesting evidences of civiliza-
tion so different from our [i.e., white American] own” (Ahrhart 1901:42). In his book about the
Midway, fairgoer Richard Barry remarked that Old Plantation’s inhabitants, along with those
in the attraction Streets of Mexico, were “essential to a Pan-American Exposition, for among
all the curious peoples of the Western Hemisphere, aside from the Indians of the West, which
were already more or less familiar through stage exploitation and printed fancy, these are the
most interesting and offer the best inducements for spectacular presentment” (1901:125).
There was “local interest,” as Barry wrote, because “school histories and the novels of a gen-
eration [had] given the American people a taste for more intimate knowledge of these trans-
planted blacks, whose pitiful history is a bitter memory, but whose cheerful life is a passing
benediction” (125–26).

This desire to have “more intimate knowledge” of Southern blacks persuaded the
Concessions Committee to include Old Plantation in the Pan-American Exposition Midway.
Ironically, three white men who were no strangers to world’s fairs or the entertainment arena
were deemed the best directors to bring forth that knowledge. The stage was set for a form of
minstrelsy with ethnologically defined African American performers and white directors.

The Benefactor, the Architect, and the Principal

The role of Midway concessionaires cannot be underestimated. They devoted $3 million14 col-
lectively in order to “amuse and at the same time instruct visitors” (Ahrhart 1901:42). Whether
it was a human village such as the Indian Congress or zoological acts such as Bostock’s Animal
Kingdom or thrill rides such as Trip to the Moon, their “business,” as Mary Bronson Hartt

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15. See also “Plantation Days of Old South: ‘Skip’ Dundy of Omaha Has Set Men to Work on His Pan-American
Concession,” unidentified clipping, 9 June 1900, vol. 9.

16. Entry for 17 January 1900, Record of Minutes of Concessions Committee Pan American Exposition: From March
25th, 1899 to May 2nd, 1900:233, 235, Frederic William Taylor Papers, Charles E. Young Research Library,
University of California, Los Angeles.

17. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.”

18. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

19. “Midway Negroes Here.”

wrote at the time, was “to study the whims of the public and to give it what it wants.” Not only
did a concessionaire have to provide “novelty with a point to it,” whether it was “beautiful,” “sci-
entific,” or “ingenious novelty,” but he also had to “be prepared to put his thousands, and even
his hundreds of thousands, into the investment” (Hartt 1901:1097).

Elmer “Skip” Dundy could meet both of these requirements. The wealthy son of a judge
from Omaha, Nebraska, Dundy knew what world’s fairs audiences wanted after successfully par-
ticipating in his hometown’s Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 (Epstein
1993:6–7).15 Reportedly “the most monied man on the Midway” (Barry 1901:144), Dundy
financed at least half a dozen attractions, including novelty acts such as Bonner, the educated
horse; a Ferris wheel–type ride called the Aeriocycle; and illusionary simulation rides such as
the Trip to the Moon (146), which was regarded as “the most startling spectacular sensation on
the Midway” ( JAI 1901c:18). The Concessions Committee granted Dundy the Old Plantation
concession based on his financial capabilities. His “proposition being 2% better than the [other
applications] on the gross receipts” and his promise “to invest at least $10,000 in the construc-
tion and equipment of the concession”16 helped Dundy defeat his competition, which included
E.W. McConnell, a rival concessionaire who owned eight Midway attractions (Barry 1901:146).

But, as Milton Epstein writes of Dundy, he “could do more than just raise money and keep
books. He could judge talent. Dundy had a nose for a winning combination and the good sense
to forge a partnership when it seemed most unlikely” (1993:5). Indeed, Dundy forged a formi-
dable partnership when he teamed up with two other men to create Old Plantation: Frederic
Thompson and Fred McClellan.

Frederic Thompson, a trained architect and electrician born in Ohio and raised in Nashville
(Groff 1915:134), had met Dundy two years earlier at the 1898 Omaha exposition (Epstein
1993:6). He had a knack for ingenuity that placed him in a class of his own. “To create a carnival
spirit,” Thompson told his peers, “a showman may use other means than ballyhoos […] bands,
freaks, shows, and free circuses. I use architecture” (1908:384–85). His designs transported visi-
tors to other worlds.

In the case of Old Plantation, Thompson may have drawn upon his experience of grow-
ing up in Nashville to transport visitors to the South. He erected an impressive plantation
mansion as the concession’s entrance (fig. 1), effectively portraying the South in an honor-
able and majestic light (Ghartey-Tagoe 2009:188). One enthralled visitor described the edifice
as an “old time Southern homestead of colonial architecture with the white walls, green win-
dow shades and stately colonnades, the whole typifying the dignity which was never lacking in
the Southern home.”17 The “dignity” of Thompson’s mansion design framed the visitor’s jour-
ney to the South, serving as a proxy for absent white slaveholders and the portal through which
the visitor was to make his/her way to the cheerful scenes of slavery behind the big house.
Thompson’s plantation setting literally made slavery a pretty picture (197), where “as far as
the eye [could] reach, extend[ed] a cotton field in full bloom”18 complete with the “James River
lazily wend[ing] its way between two green banks.”19 He constructed cabins that were not “mere
show places, but […] the real article built of logs with stick chimneys built out of one end and
raised from the ground on posts so that the pigs and chickens [could] find shelter thereunder

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20. “Plantation Days of Old South.”

21. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

22. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

23. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.”

from the noon tide heat and the
burden of the day.”20 As a space
that “breathe[d] comfort and
lazy enjoyment,” Old Plantation
offered visitors “a place of rest-
ful entertainment removed
from the noise and din of the
Midway.”21 The “low mono-
tones” of the over 150 black per-
formers “singing at their work”
added to the “realistic effect” of
Thompson’s design.22

While Dundy was the entre-
preneur and Thompson the
architect of illusion, Fred
McClellan was the theatre
director. Dundy had found in
McClellan the perfect per-
formance collaborator for the
Old Plantation. “Who has not
enjoyed some entertainment
somewhere which was pro-
vided by Fred McClellan?” was
the question posed in an arti-
cle in the Journal of American
Industries ( JAI 1901a:20). The
article predicted that out of
the “aggregation of brilliant
[Midway] managers […] men
whose foresight has brought a
smile to the face of millions[,]
men who make the most of old
ideas and are constantly invent-
ing new ones,” the name of Fred
McClellan would shine bright-
est. He had worked with such
theatre luminaries as Augustus
Pitou and had “conducted Shea’s
popular theater in Buffalo, one
of the best and most popular

amusement places in the country” (20). McClellan’s extensive performance experience made
him the perfect candidate to direct Old Plantation for the more than eight million visitors who
would come to the world’s fair.

Dundy spent a year preparing for the attraction by carefully selecting Southern blacks
with “special qualifications as singers and banjo players” to help populate typical scenes of the
South.23 Newspapers reported that he had “the reputation of not tolerating anything shiftless

Figure 2. Fred McClellan, the performance director of Old
Plantation and “principal” of the minstrel school. (From Journal
of American Industries, Special Rochester Edition 1901; courtesy
of the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archive of Play™ at The
Strong™, Rochester, New York)

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24. “Plantation Days of Old South.”

25. Contract No. 15, Old Plantation with Elmer S. Dundy, 20 March 1900, “Briefs of Pan-American Concessions
Contracts,” 25, Box 11, Folder 7, Frederic William Taylor Papers, Collection 153, Charles E. Young Research
Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

26. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

27. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

28. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

29. “Slave 96 Years Old.”

or degraded about him” and, accordingly, selected the participants of Old Plantation “from the
best classes of Southern darkies.”24 Dundy’s contract with the exposition stipulated that he had
to “employ as performers at least fifty (50) genuine negroes, of whom at least twenty (20) shall
be men, at least twenty (20) women, at least ten (10) children, all of whom shall have lived in
the Southern states all their lives.”25 In the absence of archival evidence, we cannot be sure if
out of the more than 150 Old Plantation ensemble members all were actually from the South.
Some performers were mentioned by name, and we can verify through census records that they
came from various places in Georgia, including DeKalb County and the town of Dublin.

Publicity for the exposition never questioned if Dundy’s ensemble was really comprised of
Southern blacks. Instead, it emphasized the plans Dundy, Thompson, and McClellan had for
Old Plantation, reminding everyone that Dundy had “spared no money to make this attrac-
tion as true to Southern Life as possible” ( JAI 1901b:19); that Thompson’s architecture would
offer “a place of restful entertainment”;26 and that “in this production,” McClellan had “wrought
out features which [would] appeal to all” (1901a:20). “No one should miss an attraction which
is fathered by Fred McClellan,” an article declared (20). Soon thereafter, a Buffalo newspaper
informed the public that McClellan had also taken on the role of a principal when he created a
“new school” for the performers of Old Plantation.27

The Report of a Minstrel School

Word of McClellan’s school appeared only twice, both times in the Courier, one of Buffalo’s
main newspapers. The first mention was on 11 April 1901, a month before the Old Plantation
attraction opened at the Pan-American Exposition:

A new school has been started in Charleston, the graduates of which are designed as fea-
tures of “the Old Plantation” on the Pan-American Midway. The principal of the school
is Fred McClellan and his pupils are negroes of all ages, sizes and shades of black. They
are learning cakewalks, buck dancing, rehearsing camp-meeting songs and preparing to
reproduce the Southern negro at work and at play.28

Although the second newspaper article, which was printed on 12 May 1901, did not specifically
mention a “school,” it still positioned McClellan as a director who trained the Old Plantation
performers:

Another party of Midway folk arrived at the Exposition grounds yesterday, a delega-
tion of nearly 100 Southern negroes. The negroes have never been north of the Mason
and Dixon line, and are an interesting lot. For a month they have been rehearsing songs,
dances and plantation melodies at Nashville under the direction of Fred McClellan, who
engaged them.29

It should be noted that the two newspaper articles differ in their identification of the location of
the school, although both locations were in the South. The April article reports Charleston as
the location while the May article states that it was in Nashville. The possibility of two schools
being operated simultaneously cannot be ruled out.

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30. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.”

31. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.”

32. “Wild Negro Chants and Dances.”

33. Contract No. 15.

34. As it has been noted, Buffalo was where the famous blackface troupe Christy’s Minstrels got its start in 1842
(see Anderson 2010:103). As Virginia Anderson recounts in her chronology of Buffalo theatre, the performances
of Christy’s Minstrels “would permeate Buffalo society” not only opening the door for more touring minstrel
troupes in the mid-to-late 19th century but transforming the city into a “home” for minstrelsy (2001:104).

35. “At the Theaters…Notes,” Courier, 13 December 1894.

36. “At the Theatres…Notes,” Courier, 6 December 1894.

37. “At the Theatres…Notes,” 6 December.

As I have recounted elsewhere (Ghartey-Tagoe 2009:177–82), a full-fledged publicity blitz
in various Buffalo newspapers informed the public that Old Plantation would give “a veritable
glimpse of the sunny South,” where they would have a unique opportunity to see and interact
with “genuine southern darkies.”30 A Buffalo News article stated the four main goals of the con-
cession.31 First, Old Plantation was to be “interesting and instructive,” in keeping with the over-
all themes of the exposition. Second, the concession was to reveal the mysteries of the South to
the Northerner; specifically Southerners’ “manner of living, their means of subsistence, their
homes, their industries, their amusements and customs,” which the article asserted were “as lit-
tle known as those of some far foreign country.” Third, the concession was to show “the days
of slavery when the darkey toiled and sang in the cotton field, the corn patch or the cane brake,
happy despite his bondage.” Finally, the fourth goal was to show “the South of today [as] not
so greatly different from the South of olden times,” rhetoric that was used in other plantation
shows such as Black America32 (see Ghartey-Tagoe 2009:213; Rydell 1987:147; Silber 1993:124).
This publicity presents a curious conundrum: if the “South of today” was not so different from
that of the past, there would have been no need for a school to teach blacks how they suppos-
edly lived in olden times.

Nonetheless, if we assume that the two articles about the minstrel school were true, then the
school’s creation implies that there were certain lessons Southern African Americans needed in
order to effect a successful Old Plantation. The first article designated McClellan as the “princi-
pal,” suggesting that he was the one who could design the proper curriculum that would “repro-
duce the Southern negro at work and at play.” Since McClellan had no known ties to the South
and definitely no personal experience of being a slave, his curriculum could only draw upon
his theatrical background and knowledge of what would be most palatable to a white audience:
the blackface minstrel. Though Old Plantation was supposed to be the opportunity to “study
the negro in their homely element” ( JAI 1901b:18), the Concessions Committee affirmed in
Dundy’s contract that it would not “grant to any other concessionaire a concession to repro-
duce scenes of life typical of plantation life in the southern states, or to give entertainments of
United States negroes or others in imitation of such negroes.”33 Thus, the “imitation” stood in
direct competition with the genuine.

The Buffalo theatrical scene, of which McClellan was a part, knew that “imitation” well.34 In
1894, Whalen and Martell’s popular touring plantation production, The South Before the War,
played “to capacity of [Buffalo’s] Lyceum Theater at each performance.”35 Featuring approxi-
mately 70 black and white performers,36 the show featured the exact kind of performances Old
Plantation publicity promised 1901 fairgoers: “a great variety of music, dancing, camp- meeting
scenes, and a very laughable cake-walk, with which the show concludes… Ther [sic] are also a
number of buck and wing dancers, and a host of clever people in specialty acts.”37 Headlining
this “oldest colored troupe” were Charles Howard and Billy Williams, white men in blackface
“whose impersonation of the darkey as he really is,” as a newspaper declared, “[has] never been

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38. “Theatrical,” Courier, 9 December 1894.

39. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.”

40. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

41. “Plantation Days of Old South.”

42. “Old Plantation Befo’ De Wah.”

excelled.”38 For the “imitation” to have bested the genuine in this earlier production meant that
Buffalo audiences may have already had a palate for the image of blackness propagated through
the minstrel act.

If Eric Lott’s assertion is correct that “black performance” — and, I would argue, “blackness” —
is “‘performative,’ a cultural invention, not some precious essence installed in black bodies”
(1993:39), then it would appear that McClellan’s school would be the process through which a
white director could install that precious essence (i.e., the minstrel act) in the literal bodies of
Old Plantation’s black performers. For potential audiences, the minstrel school functioned as a
site of white certification of blackness. Dundy and McClellan had given their stamp of approval:
the best of the best had been chosen and they had been trained to put on a good show. In being
told of the central role McClellan played, the audience was asked to see the work of the white
concessionaires behind the act; to acknowledge that whites could define blackness and teach it
to blacks; and to appreciate that blacks could learn how to present themselves accordingly.

In the absence of published accounts of what might have taken place in those rehearsals at
the minstrel school, and with no concrete evidence even of its existence, we are put in the same
position as the potential 1901 audience member who read those newspaper reports: we must
imagine what the process might have looked like.

The Minstrel School Curriculum
Imagining Rehearsals

I entreat the reader to allow the report of McClellan’s school to conjure in your imagination
how his lessons might have taken place. My process is to draw upon my personal theatrical
experience of what rehearsals can entail and conjecture about the minstrel school’s curriculum
from the two newspaper accounts, Dundy’s contract stipulations, the Old Plantation publicity
claims, and visitor accounts of their experiences.

If Old Planation aimed to portray “southern negro life befo’ de wah’,”39 then the mission
of the school would have been to offer one degree: the “GSDD” — Genuine Southern Darkey
Degree. The fact that the performers were African Americans was not enough. They had to
present an image of the Southern plantation slave, which none of them were by 1901. The
African American performers were all free people with varying degrees of knowledge about
actual slave life. With “pupils […] of all ages, sizes and shades of black,”40 from “old Uncles and
Aunties” (Ahrhart 1901:43) to children whom the publicity called “pickaninnies,” certain lessons
would have been necessary to get the entire company on the same page of being “real […] old
time darkies.”41

Lesson One: Live in a “Happy-Go-Lucky Fashion”

The South today is not so greatly different from the South of olden times. In many sec-
tions the same primitive customs, methods and modes of living prevail. The darkey still
lives in the same happy-go-lucky fashion, thinking not of the morrow, knowing naught of
the great busy world about him, dwelling in the little sphere bounded by the limits of the
horizon, where dwelt his father and his father’s father; toiling often for the descendants
of those who years ago held his forefathers in bondage and living the very life led by his
bonded forefathers.42

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43. Contract No. 15.

44. See Barry (1901:156) for an image of children playing a dice game and (157) for a photograph titled “Three
‘Cullud Gemmen.”

45. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

46. “Plantation Days of Old South.”

47. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

Based on publicity and visitors’ repeated references to the “cheerful life” led by antebellum
black slaves (Barry 1901:125), Old Plantation’s student-actors would have had to learn how to
look like they were living life without a care in the world, as if “the only thought the negro gave
to life was for a full stomach and a comfortable place to sleep” ( JAI 1901b:18). This would have
been an easy thing to direct; the performers would be living on a re-created site where Dundy
would literally house and feed them.43 Part of this lesson might have been to give them instruc-
tions on how they would live on the compound — to tell them which re-created cabin they
would sleep in or who their bunkmates might be or explain to them they would have to eat in
segregated eating rooms (Omaha Daily Bee 1901:2).

The actors of Old Plantation also had to perform everyday living. Was the direction “Just
be yourself ” enough for the director of the minstrel school? Did he have his students demon-
strate what they really did in their home lives and then simply select and tweak the activities
that would most appeal to audiences? Did McClellan instruct the little children of the com-
pany to “Play a game of craps or two on the grounds”? Or, to the older men, “Just sit and relax
in front of the cabin”?44 Perhaps McClellan taught his pupils how to act naturally in front of
an audience, putting them in small groups to perform for each other so that they could over-
come feeling self-conscious. The improvisational qualities of everyday life-ness may have been
the hardest aspect to control, and that would have made lessons two and three that much more
essential to students for achieving their GSDDs.

Lesson Two: Picking Cotton

The students had to learn the actual performances that constituted the image of the genuine
darkey — the reproductions of the “Southern negro at work and at play.” The “at work” aspect
involved picking cotton in a manner that would show “the days of slavery when the darkey
toiled and sang in the cotton field, the corn patch or the cane brake, happy despite his bond-
age.” If observing cotton picking meant seeing the combination of “the darkies industriously
engaged in picking the fluffy bloom” and “the low monotones of the negroes singing at their
work [adding] to the realistic effect,”45 as publicity anticipated this scene would be played, then
it would seem that part of the rehearsal would have focused on perfecting catchy melodies for
potential audiences. One wonders if the principal rehearsed the students in a nearby cotton
field. Did he use former slaves or sharecroppers as teaching assistants to make sure the cotton
picking was “authentic” enough? What were the prompts McClellan gave to his performers to
get them to “illustrate before the eyes of visitors the plantation life in the South before the War,
its toils, its mortifications and hardships, but especially its joys”?46 “Bend down a little lower,
John.” Perhaps: “Hum a little louder, Henrietta.” Or even: “Smile a little when you pick the
fluffy bloom, Tannie.”

Lesson Three: Singing and Dancing

Reproducing the Southern negro “at play” involved a variety of entertainments: cakewalks,
buck dancing, and camp-meeting songs.47 McClellan may have excelled in his direction of
these activities given his extensive background of performing on stage at Shea’s Music Hall.
The fact that Dundy would try to secure popular African American musical talents such as the
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48. Also, see “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.” To date, I have found no evidence to confirm if Dundy was suc-
cessful in acquiring these acts.

49. “Plantation Most Delightful Feature.”

50. “Midway at a Cost of $3,000,000 — Old Plantation.”

were trying to deliver top-notch acts ( JAI 1901b:18).48 Publicity described a theatre within Old
Plantation where “the evolution of the negro [would] be shown, from the day of weird songs
of slavery days to the latest black swell with a bunch of ragtime songs.”49 Or as another news-
paper stated: “In the theater is shown the old slave and the new ‘coon.’”50 A key feature of that
“evolution” would be the cakewalk, the high-stepping dance created by African Americans that
had “roots in African music through its traits of syncopation or suspended beat, polyrhythmic
structure, signifying, improvisation, and responsoriality” (Baldwin 1981:211). African Americans
who performed this dance ensured that a “genuinely black cultural product” reinvigorated the
late-19th-century minstrel act (211), and the dance became an expected staple of plantation
productions and other popular stage acts (Webb 2004). If McClellan’s students could master the
cakewalk, they would surely get their GSDDs in no time.

Figure 3. McClellan’s purported graduates of the minstrel school in the Old Plantation attraction. “A Cake
Walk on the Old Plantation, Pan-American Exposition.” 1901. Stereograph. (Photographer unknown;
courtesy of Early Pictures, www.earlypics.com, private collection)

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51. “Pastry Cakewalkers Shamed,” Courier, 16 May 1901, vol. 10.

52. “Pastry Cakewalkers Shamed.”

53. “Stadium Opened. Exposition Workmen and Midway Folk Join in the Sports. 8,000 Persons Look On.” Express,
16 May 1901, vol 10.

54. “Pastry Cakewalkers Shamed.”

55. “Stadium Opened”; “Pastry Cakewalkers Shamed.”

56. “Pastry walker” is perhaps a term for a cakewalk performer; “Pastry Cakewalkers Shamed.”

Graduation Day
“They Came in True Ethiopian Style”

The outcome of this minstrel school was that its graduates should have graduated summa cum
laude as “real Southern negroes.”51 Upon their performance debut four days after their arrival
at the fairgrounds, newspapers celebrated the authenticity of the black performers. Dancing
the cakewalk before an audience of 8,000, the minstrel school graduates stole the limelight in a
parade of Midway acts. Two newspaper articles capture the scene:

The merry notes of real Southern negroes’ laughter rose above the strains of the band,
which was discoursing a few bars of “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” when the people
from Dundy’s Old Plantation came into sight.52

Out onto the arena, like a shower of seeds from a bursting melon, spread 50 negroes. 25
bucks, 25 wenches from the Old Plantation, paired couple by couple, clad in grotesque
garb and dancing and cakewalking with an abandon and grace that brought the crowd up
laughing and cheering. […] Out on the field they went, toes-tapping, side-stepping, bow-
ing, pirouetting.53

Not a person in the whole assemblage, except perchance a stray foreigner of one of the
other shows, doubted the reality of the negroes, for they came in true Ethiopian style,
stepping high and with arched bodies. It was a genuine negro cake-walk with all the
negroisms and idiosyncrasies of the colored man’s national sport.54

The audience’s growing applause had a direct effect on the performance efforts of the Old
Plantation reenactors, who “were delighted and redoubled their energies in the dance” —
“ben[ding] lower and lower and stepp[ing] higher and higher as the exit was made.”55

How did Northern viewers know what was “true Ethiopian style” or “genuine” “negro-
isms”? What precisely was “authentic” from the audience’s point of view? They may have been
responding to the authentic nature of the minstrel act rather than to the authentic nature of a
Southern black person. Viewers declared the authenticity of these Southern performers by com-
paring them to their Northern counterparts. Some noted that the performers had “steps that
would put to shame the gyrations of a Northern pastry walker”56 and that the Southern black
performer “is a more valuable acquisition than the somewhat machine-made coon of the variety
stage” because he “has more of the real ginger of genuine enjoyment and gives more correctly a
picture of real Southern life” (Barry 1901:126).

The fact that the audience could receive these publicly trained performers as more authen-
tic than the “machine-made coon” and that no one “doubted the reality of the negroes, for they
came in true Ethiopian style” is intriguing in light of the fact that it had been made known that
the performers had attended a minstrel school and that McClellan and Dundy had created the
attraction. That is part of the conundrum of this manufactured authenticity. Based on the exten-
sive reportage of Old Plantation, fairgoers knew that three white men were the masterminds
and directors behind the act and they knew that the black performers had been rehearsed, yet
they still walked away from the performances praising how “genuine” and “real” the Southern
blacks were.

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57. “Old Plantation.”

Descriptive adjectives such as “real,” “genuine,” and “true” routinely peppered responses to
the Old Plantation performers throughout the seven-month fair. The attraction’s emphasis on
ethnology succeeded in positioning Southern blacks as foreigners and audience members as
students of anthropology called upon to study “the Southern negro at work and at play.” But
newspapers would occasionally remind fairgoers of the inauthenticity of the spectacle, even
as they acknowledged its success. “The inhabitants of Old Plantation are spruced up and pol-
ished since reconstruction days,” the Buffalo Express wrote, “but underneath the skin they are
the same negroes that Lincoln championed and for whom Grant fought.”57 Thus, while a min-
strel school could be taken as a necessity for a good show, prolonged observation would remind
fairgoers that the old time darkey was still there “underneath” McClellan’s direction. Even so,
Old Plantation effectively demonstrated that a white Northerner could teach Southern blacks
how to perform a version of themselves that would reap the reward of audience admiration
and appreciation.

Extra Credit
Black Agency

In theatrical productions, there is usually a moment when the director and the choreographer
must entrust performers with the execution of the performance and its techniques. When that
happens, the performance can take on a life of its own. While McClellan and Dundy may have
been able to teach the moves of the cakewalk or give instructions about which songs to sing,
were they as capable in teaching the quality of the song or dance? Was there indeed something
extra that these performers brought to their act that went beyond McClellan’s instructions?
One of three extant short films of Old Plantation reveals this tension between white direction
and black authenticity. Ballyhoo Cake Walk (Marvin 1903), one of the only films to document this
popular dance of the turn of the 20th century (Baldwin 1981:214), was created by the American
Mutoscope and Biograph Company as one of several short clips made of the World’s Fair.
Filmed just in front of Old Plantation, the ballyhoo was supposed to entice visitors to enter the
attraction by giving them a glimpse of what was inside the pillared mansion’s doors. The film
affords us a glimpse of the very dance style that brought the 8,000 audience members to their
feet at the debut of the Old Plantation performers.

In the film, a male baton twirler, clad in a lighter-shaded suit (which appears white in the
black-and-white film), moves forward toward the camera, effortlessly maneuvering the baton
around his body as his marching feet keep time to a rhythmic song. Upward and then down-
ward the baton twirls as he leads a procession of couples who prance forward on the same beat.
African American women holding the fronts of their skirts away from their bodies prance-
march as they lean back at various angles. They smile toward their male partners, who wear
suits and hats and hold canes. Suddenly, a swooping-bowing movement momentarily suspends
the procession. The ladies sweep their torsos downward to their left in a brief curtsy and con-
tinue moving in an arc back up, leaning away from their partners while the gentlemen remove
their hats, one turning directly to face the camera at the end of the sweeping beat. Never vary-
ing from the rhythm, the men return their hats to their heads, the ladies come out of their
leaned-back postures, and the couples return to their forward prance as more couples pass in
front of the camera. Each dancer has a unique style of movement. Some of the men twirl while
prance-marching forward, some ladies prance-march backward with a slight lean, and other
performers kick their knees up high. Eleven male-female couples pass in front of the camera,
some even smiling in acknowledgment toward it, and the procession is concluded by two tall,
high-kicking men clad in what looks like pajamas. The film runs for less than a minute, then
abruptly goes to black.

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58. It was not unusual for plantation productions in the 1890s to have black directors. For example, Billy McClain,
one of the most prominent black talents in these types of shows, served as the musical director (and some sources
claim the actual director) for Black America (1895), and had previously been assistant stage manager for Whalen
and Martell’s The South Before the War (Webb 2004:74, 76).

The flowing dresses of the women,
the variations of large and small hats
on the men (and some of the women),
and the finesse with which each per-
former dances are enough to eclipse
a more pertinent action happening
onscreen — the interplay between two
men, one black and one white, who
are in the background throughout

most of the film. Observing their actions during the procession may provide telling information
about the dynamics of the conflation of black authenticity and white theatrical direction. They
both seem to play the role of a director and I will refer to them as such.58

Figure 4a. Still shots (1–12) captured by the author from the Arthur Marvin film Ballyhoo Cake Walk
(1903). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Figure 5. Black director (foreground)
gestures with right hand as baton twirler
passes. White director (with hat) stands
in the background. Ballyhoo Cake Walk
(1903) still image taken by author from
the Arthur Marvin film. (Courtesy of the
Library of Congress)

65 7 8

21 3 4

109 11 12

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The black director makes his way
downstage on a diagonal, in line with
the baton twirler, as the white direc-
tor makes his way upstage toward the
entrance of the performers just off
screen. The black man’s attention is
clearly on the baton twirler (fig. 4a,
stills 1–5). As the twirler crosses in
front of the camera, the black man’s
right hand comes up as if gesturing
to the twirler to follow a certain footpath (fig. 4a, still 6 & fig. 5). For a moment, he looks like
he too is prance-marching alongside the baton twirler as they both exit off camera, but this is
uncertain (fig. 4a, still 7). Simultaneously, the white director intently watches the procession
that crosses the camera, and begins to move downstage (fig. 4a, stills 7–10). He takes a few steps
forward, halts, and then at the moment of the first sweeping movement, moves forward more
quickly (fig. 4b, stills 16–18), clearly pointing with his right hand (fig. 4b, still 19 & fig. 6) and
speaking as if telling the performers to move quickly past the camera. As soon as he speaks, the

Figure 4b. Still shots (13–24) captured by the author from the Arthur Marvin film Ballyhoo Cake Walk
(1903). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Figure 6. White director (in hat, near
center) gestures with right hand as dancers
complete their suspended-bows. Ballyhoo
Cakewalk (1903) still image taken by
author from the Arthur Marvin film.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

1817 19 20

1413 15 16

2221 23 24

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couples, who are suspended in their sweeping movement, begin to prance-march forward again
(fig. 4b, stills 20–22), and the white director stops gesturing and speaking to the performers.
The black director re-enters from off camera (fig. 4b, still 23), stopping behind the couples who
are pausing to do their sweeping bow movement, this time obviously gesturing with his right
hand toward one couple (fig. 4b, still 24) and then stopping downstage center to watch each
couple as they pass (fig. 4c, stills 25–35). As the black director watches, the white director has
begun walking diagonally upstage left to exit where the couples entered, disappearing off cam-
era (fig. 4c, stills 32–35), leaving the black director standing downstage center toward the cam-
era as the last two pajama-clad men pass by and are almost off camera before blackout (fig. 4c,
still 36).

We do not know what these two directors said to the performers, who they were, or whether
they were directing just for this camera shoot or did this in all ballyhoos. But I find their dual
presence compelling in considering the rehearsed aspect of Old Plantation. This film is clear
evidence that direction of this black troupe happened in public view, even if it was just for the
camera. Yet juxtaposed with this direction is the individuality and uniqueness that each per-
former brought to the act. There does seem to be a natural (for lack of a better word) sensibil-
ity to these performers. Not natural in the sense that the dance is inherent in them, but natural
in the sense that they do not conform to only one mode of performance. Were the minstrel
school students directed to be individuals in their performance qualities in order to present a
more “authentic” representation of black people? Was this a director’s point of view or some-
thing the performers brought to the table? This film raises a series of questions about what was
really happening in the performances at Old Plantation. To what extent did the rehearsal pro-
cess inform the outcome?

Figure 4c. Still shots (25–36) captured by the author from the Arthur Marvin film Ballyhoo Cake Walk
(1903). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

25 26 27 28

33 34

29 30 31 32

35 36

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59. “Midway Negroes Here.”

60. “Old Uncle Ben,” Commercial Advertiser, 27 July 1901, vol. 15.

61. Courier-Dispatch (Dublin, GA), 23 May 1901:5. Oconee Regional Library, Dublin, Georgia.

62. “Midway in Full Swing”; “Midway Negroes Here.”

63. Dundy and Thompson’s penchant for spectacular illusion led to one of the most important amusement partner-
ships of the early 20th century. Nicknamed “[the] P.T. Barnums of their generation,” they created the popular
amusement center Luna Park at Coney Island within five years of the Pan-American Exposition (Chicago Inter-
Ocean 1906). In some records, Fred McClellan is listed as the manager of Luna Park, but I have not been able to
confirm that this McClellan is the same as the Buffalo world’s fair partner (Washington Times 1907:6).

Old Plantation performers might have introduced “authentic possibilities,” as Barbara Webb
(2004) argues about other large-scale plantation productions; black innovation and original per-
formances could have occurred even within the constraints of McClellan’s direction. One per-
former who demonstrates that Old Plantation participants had a certain level of key agency
is Ben Ellington. Nicknamed “Laughing Ben,” he was reportedly a 96-year-old former slave
from Dublin, Georgia, and as newspapers described him, “the oldest man on the plantation and
[…] also the merriest.”59 His claim to fame was his loud and extraordinarily long laugh, which
peppered his tales of the good and bad times he had as a slave. A vaudevillian type of perfor-
mance in the context of the minstrel show, Laughing Ben’s laugh and slave autobiography made
him the most famous character of the entire Midway.60 Elsewhere, I have examined the mean-
ing of his laughing act (Ghartey-Tagoe 2009:200–203; Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin 2011), but what
is important to note here is that Ben appeared to be in control of his performances. He had
already created this character prior to coming to the fair, and he had his own personal manager,
a white man from Dublin, Georgia, named Hardy Smith.61 Laughing Ben knew how to entice
his audience members to pay him five cents for his laughs, five more cents just to stop, and then
slyly announce that he deserved ten cents if he’d laughed a particularly long laugh.62 When
Eb Huntington, a visitor from Minnesota, took a picture of him, Laughing Ben demanded:
“You got my picture, now you’ve got to give me 10 cents.” Onlookers remarked that the laugh
was then “on Huntington, who forked over the dime” (Minneapolis Journal 1901:7). Ben was
“nobody’s fool,” as one newspaper writer asserted (New York Sun 1901:8). How many of the
other over 150 performers also demonstrated a sense of agency in their performance?

Applied Learning
Continuing Education

Old Plantation was intended to be experienced as the outcome of instruction, rehearsal, and
white direction. Even if what audiences saw was the result of genuine black input into the act,
this would only help to buttress claims of authenticity. Dundy, McClellan, and Thompson’s sys-
tematic manufacture of black authenticity was a foreshadowing of the kind of spectacular illu-
sions for which they would become famous a few years later.63 From the reports of a minstrel
school to the construction of the site, these men had taken steps that compelled audiences to
look past the contradictions of instruction and realism, rehearsal and the natural, and believe an
image of blackness that was such an extreme caricature that it has persisted until this day.

Robert Townsend may have been on to something when he created an infomercial for a
“Black Acting School” in his film Hollywood Shuffle (1987), a satire about the challenges present-
day black actors encounter because of the dearth of acting opportunities and the stereotypical
roles that Hollywood and its audiences want them to play. Townsend’s “Black Acting School”
commercial features white instructors literally teaching black actors how to “talk” and “walk
black” and how to play TV pimps, movie muggers, and street punks. The school offers courses
like Jive 101 or Epic Slaves 400. Townsend’s preface sums it up well: “I had to learn to play
these slave parts and now you can too at Hollywood’s first black acting school. It teaches you

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everything.” Little did viewers and perhaps even Townsend know that there actually was such a
school nearly 100 years earlier.

As Townsend’s fictional acting program and Old Plantation’s reported school demonstrate,
there is a false image of blackness that is constructed and propagated by the mainstream and
that, dangerously enough, thrives because of black participation. Have reality TV shows become
the ethnological spaces of our present day? One wonders what instructions today’s white direc-
tors and writers give to black actors in films and television shows that purport to demonstrate
the modern black experience. Who’s writing the curriculum for blackness today? Who’s learn-
ing it? Even more importantly, who believes it?

References

Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. (2002) 2009. Out of Sight: The Rise of African-American Popular Music,
1889–1895. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Ahrhart, Charles. 1901. Official Catalogue and Guide Book to the Pan-American Exposition, with Maps of
Exposition and Illustrations. Buffalo: Charles Ahrhart.

Anderson, Virginia. 2010. “‘You Hip to Buffalo?’ The Hidden Heritage of Black Theatre in Western
New York.” Theatre History Studies 2010: African and African American Theatre Past and Present 30
( January):102–21.

Baldwin, Brooke. 1981. “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality.” Journal of Social History 15,
2:205–18.

Barry, Richard Hayes. 1901. Snap Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am Expo, Including Characteristic Scenes and
Pastimes of Every Country There Represented. Buffalo, NY: R.A. Reid.

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