Pickaninny Dance from the Passing Show or, The Pickaninnies Rastus, Joe performer Tolliver, Denny performer Wilkins, Walter performer Film 1894-10-06 Edison Kinetoscope Co. Thomas Edison's 1894 "Pickaninny Dance" from The Passing Show, featuring Joe Rastus, Denny Tolliver, and Walter Wilkins, "the first African Americans to appear before a motion picture camera" performing a "jig and a breakdown." Shot by William Heise in the Black Maria Studio in West Orange, New Jersey, the catalog annotation describes this fifty-foot kinetoscope as a scene representing Southern plantation life before the Civil War. The "three colored boys" were members of Lucy Daly's Pickaninny troupe in The Passing Show, a farce comedy that had played at New York's Casino Roof Garden from May to August 1894. Rastus, Tolliver, and Wilkins were three in the group of eleven black male dancers forming Daly's troupe who were secured by the Edison Company to film a part of their act. These three young men played a trio of professional dancers engaged in the rivalrous camaraderie of a buck challenge dance, alternately performing for and accompanying each other. Performing Arts Encyclopedia http://www.loc.gov/performingarts Musser, Charles: Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press (1997). Tap Dance America http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html tda IHAS 151216 loc.music.tda.672