On the one hand, the blackface tradition has been buried (not gone--just buried) in North American popular performance culture since the early years of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The Internet, however, has created an environment for the distribution of everything by everybody. A few minutes on YouTube will resurrect a range of imagery and of performance. Writing now (in March 2008) you will find the following examples:
- a silent film with the great African American blackface performer Bert Williams from 1916.
- samples of blackface performance in early sound musicals, both well-known (Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) and obscure (Glenn Vernon and Edward Ryan), and performances of the singing blacked-up face in early television (the British 'Black and White Minstrels,' still on air in the early 1970s).
- samples of the minstrel dialect and caricature in early sound recordings (Moran and Mack), in Hollywood film (Stepin Fetchit), and in later film and early television (the 'characters' of 'Amos 'n' Andy'), and in animation (see 'blackface in cartoons,' for example.
- you will find examples of the more political uses of blackface in popular performance, including two of the most unsettling (in this writer's opinion): Pat Paulsen's censored performance of blackface on an afternoon talkshow in 1974 (never aired), and the 'enforced' use of blackface in Lars Von Trier's Manderlay.
- finally, in addition to documentaries, re-creations and re-interpretations of blackface across YouTube, there is the salutary, sad (and illegally posted) final segment of Spike Lee's Bamboozled.