"Segregation or Death," circa 1957

This sheet music includes the music and lyrics for a minstrel show and the image of a blackface character. Minstrel shows generally featured white actors wearing black makeup (known as blackface) who portrayed racist stereotypes of African Americans through singing and dancing. American audiences considered these shows comical and attended minstrel shows for over a century, from the live theater of the early 1800s to the films of the early-20th century. They even appeared in mid-20th century children's cartoons. The lyrics on this sheet are attributed to Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-1860), who introduced the character "Jim Crow", a stereotypical African American, in 1832. The cover image may also depict Rice, an American singer, dancer, and composer, one of the first well-known blackface performers. The "Jimmy Crow" song made Rice internationally famous. The song's popularity first brought the term into the American language as derogatory slang referring to African Americans. "Jim Crow" eventually referred to the two separate societies - one black, one white - followed throughout the United States. This system was formalized in the South by state laws passed in the late-19th century. Blacks and whites could not sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same bathrooms or eat in the same restaurants, for example. Not until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was segregation outlawed.