(Ralph Keeler) “Three Years as a Negro Minstrel” in Atlantic Monthly, July 1869, Pp. 71-85. Complete issue, softbound in original wrappers. (Moderate edgewear and age toning.  Near Very Good overall.)

This article, one of the few autobiographic accounts of the antebellum minstrelsy which perpetuated a racist stereotype of Black men and women – and their popular music - to thousands of Americans who had never seen a Southern slave, details Keeler’s early life, how he came to join a Minstrel troupe, and his experiences as an entertainer aboard Mississippi steamers, including his observation of a lynch mob searching for a Black man in Cairo, Illinois, who only escaped being hanged or burned alive by blowing himself up on a keg of gunpowder.

Written anonymously by a journalist who had lived an amazing life before he mysteriously disappeared at the age of 33.  Born in the Ohio wilderness, Keeler was orphaned as a child and ran away from abusive relatives to become a cabin boy on Lake Erie steamers.  Returning to Ohio in his early teens, he bought a banjo and a “wooly wig” and taught himself to act, sing and dance and, joining a blackface Minstrel troupe became one of the most best-known blackface minstrel entertainers in America before the Civil War. He then went to college, traveled and studied in Europe, and returned to America to become a newspaper reporter in California under the tutelage of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. After writing this article, Keeler published a book on his “Vagabond Adventures”, elaborating on his minstrel experiences, and then in 1873 went to Spanish Cuba, then in revolutionary ferment, as special correspondent of the New York Tribune.  There he disappeared, allegedly murdered aboard a Caribbean steamer, his body being thrown overboard.