Minstrel Show, circa 1920s

White youngsters, adorned in blackface, pose as a troupe of cotton pickers. Cotton bolls spill from a handmade woven basket. The galvanized tub evokes those in which poor Blacks and whites scrubbed and washed clothes for their own families and those of their employers. The scene conjures the biting comment made by Black writer Zora Neale Hurston: “Everyone seems to think that the Negro is easily imitated when nothing is further from the truth. Without exception I wonder why the blackface comedians are blackface; it is a puzzle—good comedians, but darn poor n–––.” In the early twentieth century, minstrel shows performed at local movie theaters and set up tents for performances on the southside of Columbus, where the Confederate Army once had a weapons arsenal. Pruitt’s negatives reveal that throughout his career he photographed whites blackened for minstrel shows and community plays. Examples abound of minstrelsy’s lingering legacy into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Filmmaker Spike Lee documented this painfully in Bamboozled. With a searing persistence of cultural love and cultural theft, the Pruitt image depicts the entertainment practice that scholar Susan Gubar calls “blackface lynching.”