Charles Hicks

Charles Barney Hicks (? – 1902) was an African-American advance man, manager, performer, and owner of blackface minstrel troupes composed of African-American performers. Hicks himself was a talented minstrel performer who could sing and play challenging roles such as the minstrel-show interlocutor or endmen. However, he was most interested in the business side of minstrelsy. Over the course of his career, he worked with most successful black minstrel troupes as manager, owner or both. The white-dominated minstrel market proved hostile to a black owner, and Hicks (like his contemporary, Lew Johnson) had to travel abroad or manage for white owners in order to make a reliable living. Nevertheless, both white and black rivals came to respect him. One observer in 1891 wrote, "This man Hicks was a dangerous man to all outside managers and they all were afraid of him." In 1912, Hicks was the sole African American listed on M. B. Leavitt's list of "best known advance agents during the last fifty years".

Hicks's first major accomplishment was the key role he played in 1865 to form Brooker and Clayton's Georgia Minstrels. He served as the manager and probably performed with them during a tour through the Northeastern United States in 1865-6. Hicks and company became the first black minstrel troupe to have a successful season.

Hicks left Brooker and Clayton's in 1866 to try his hand at owning and managing a company of his own, becoming the first black man to do both simultaneously. Over the next four years, Hicks started and disbanded a number of unsuccessful groups. He played up his black minstrels' connection to legitimate black culture with names like the Slave Troupe or the Georgia Slave Brothers, and evidence suggests that Hicks's companies did draw significant numbers of black viewers. In early 1869, a Pittsburgh newspaper reported that the "colored element of the city turned out en masse" to see Hicks's Georgia Slave Troupe. In 1870, Hicks and his partner Bob Height led Hicks and Height's Georgia Minstrels on tour in Germany, the first black minstrel troupe to perform in that country.

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