White performers who copied Black acts became more famous than the originals

Evidence

There was the fiddler Old Corn Meal, who began as a popular street vendor and wound up, in 1837, as the first Black man to perform as himself on a white New Orleans stage. His stuff was copied by George Nichols, a white man who took up blackface after a start in plain old clowning and—surprise, surprise—became much more famous than the Black man whose act he swiped. But for the most part, there was no reliable way, in the antebellum era, for Black entertainers to perform on a stage without the trademark makeup. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1120

Categorization

• SEED: The Old Corn Meal/George Nichols swiping story is a potent, concrete anchor for an essay on how white appropriation of Black art erased originators throughout US history.