Photograph: John Collier: Bridgeton, New Jersey. FSA (Farm Security Administration) agricultural workers' camp. Colored minstrels advertising their show. 1942.

Description with photograph: "To put it another way, black was cool.

The music and dance of the black community were new, exciting, and astonishingly beautiful, and whites wanted to sing black songs and dance black steps. They wanted to experience blackness, while keeping actual blacks a safe distance away. Love and theft, lure and loathing co-existed in an uneasy embrace.

It was this ambivalence -- the fact that blackface was not entirely about hatred -- that allowed African-American entertainers to participate minstrelsy and sometime to go as far as blackening their faces. Given the racial climate of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blackface was, as Michael Rogin wrote in Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, "...the vehicle by which black performers... gained access to the stage."