A black-face minstrel show was presented by the Lykens & Wiconisco (L & W) Home Town Minstrels at the Midland Theatre, Valley View, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, on the evening of May 1, 1925. The advertisement for the event appeared in the Lykens Standard, April 24, 1925.
MIDLAND THEATRE – VALLEY VIEW
May 1, 1925 – ONE NIGHT ONLY
L & W Home Town Minstrels
30 – PEOPLE – 30
4 – FUNNY ENDMEN – 4
CHORUSES — SOLOS — DANCES
A PERFORMANCE SUPREME
SPECIAL SCENERY — NEW COSTUMES
JAZZY — PEPPY — ORCHESTRA
The Best Performance Here in Years
Not a motion picture – Be sure to see it
The ad featured a grotesque caricature, so it did not have to be stated in the ad that the “end men” would be appearing in black-face. The ad appeared in the Lykens Standard next to another ad for a racist event, a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Halifax, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, on April 28, 1925, at the I. O. O. F. (Odd Fellows) Hall, to which “All White Gentile Protestant Americans are Cordially Invited.”
White men and women, who blackened their faces, and performed emphasizing negative stereotypical behavior that they attributed to African Americans, for the purpose of getting laughs, were often the most prominent people in the community. In this case, the minstrel show was performed by an organization from Lykens and Wiconisco that lasted into 21st century before it finally disbanded. It is not known when this organization stopped using black-face in their shows.
This post is part of a series in which news articles, photographs and other “memorabilia” are presented to show how “black-face” was infused into the culture of the Lykens Valley area. Readers are invited to submit photos and recollections on how long this offensive “entertainment” lasted and what locals thought of it as part of the culture of the area.
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News articles from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.