The white person most frequently identified as the father of the art form is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T. D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy’’ Rice, “the negro, par excellence.”20 Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork in grotesque approximation of the enslaved Black people he was imitating.
