Photograph: Walker Evans: Minstrel poster. Alabama. 1936.
Description with photo: "Blackface wasn't new. As this poster suggests, it has roots in minstrelsy. Even though actors sometimes blackened their faces in Shakespeare's day, blackface first became a popular form of entertainment -- the most popular form of entertainment -- in nineteenth-century America, when, as Eric Lott puts it in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, white men began to caricature blacks "for sport and profit."