As you might guess, that's not the name of any real person. Jim Crow was, arguably, the original minstrel show character. The performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-1860) didn't invent minstrelsy, but he was its first famous practitioner, and Jim Crow was his (grotesquely stereotyped) blackface persona. " Mental Floss
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:42PM on August 13, 2020