This talk charts the ironic trajectory of the Circassian beauty phenomenon, the magnum afro-coiffed and once widely popular performers who debuted on American stages months after the end of the Civil War as ostensible representations of – it may be difficult to imagine now – white racial purity. These women purportedly hailed from “noble,” “brave” Circassia, cast as the “purest” of all in the Northern Caucasus mountain area where German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1762-1840) claimed one could locate the origins of the white race. As if a harbinger of what was to come, one performer, “Zumigo” was of African descent. What does it mean that an aesthetic that we commonly, if reductively, associate with black racial authenticity and black empowerment was once associated with an ostensible display of white racial purity during America's foundational period of racial upheaval?