Fredrick Douglass was perhaps the most influential spokesperson during the 19th century abolitionist movement. In 1848, three years after writing his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, he began a weekly newsletter called the North Star. (1) The North Star published multiple articles regarding Douglass’s take on nineteenth-century minstrelsy. The most influential of these articles was seen in a review of The Hutchinson Family minstrel troupe on October 27, 1848 issue: “Blackface imitators were the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”(2) Douglass’s opinion was important, as it arguably reflected the black community’s overall opinion of minstrelsy. Historian Andrew Womack argued this idea, saying that “the general black sentiment saw minstrelsy as clear racial expropriation.”(3)
"We wonder what has excited within [the white man's] heart this intense and burning hatred of niggers. Has he ever been eclipsed by a nigger? Was he ever refused the society of niggers? Has he ever been robbed by a nigger? Did a nigger ever steal and enslave a white man? Were his children ever excluded from school by a nigger?"
-Fredrick Douglass October 27, 1848
1) "Fredrick Douglass." PBS. Accessed September 22, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1539.html.
2) Womack, Andrew. "Ridicule and Wonder: The Beginnings of Minstrelsy and New York." Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 36, no. 2 (2012).
3) Womack, Andrew. "Ridicule and Wonder: The Beginnings of Minstrelsy and New York." Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 36, no. 2 (2012).