This image is a reproduction of a poster advertising the Old Reliable New Orleans Minstrels. The poster features caricatures named "Lollypop & Sparky" and is characteristic of American minstrel shows from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Minstrel Shows Description Minstrel shows were a popular form of American entertainment where performers, typically white men, used burnt cork or shoe polish to blacken their faces, a practice known as blackface.Content The performances consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music that presented highly offensive and racist caricatures of African Americans.Themes These caricatures stereotyped Black people as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, and hypersexual, serving to demean them for the entertainment of white audiences and to confirm racist perceptions.Legacy The minstrel show was the first uniquely American form of theatre and was immensely popular, popularizing characters like "Jim Crow," which later became the name for the system of racial segregation laws. The minstrel show was one of the first native forms of American entertainment, and Rice was rightly regarded as the "Father of American minstrelsy." He had many imitators. In 1843, four white men from New York, billed as the Virginia Minstrels, darkened their faces and imitated the singing and dancing of black people. They used violins, castanets, banjos, bones, and tambourines. Their routine was successful and they were invited to tour the country. In 1845, the Christy Minstrels (for whom Stephen Foster wrote some of his most popular songs) originated many features of the minstrel show, including the seating of the blackface performers in a semicircle on stage, with the tambourine player (Mr. Tambo) at one end, and the bones player (Mr. Bones) at the other; the singing of songs, called Ethiopian melodies, with harmonized choruses; and the humorous banter of jokes between the endmen and the performer in the middle seat (Mr. Interlocutor). These performers were sometimes called Ethiopian Delineators

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