Earliest Tap On Film- "The First African Americans to appear before a motion picture camera" Scene representing Southern plantation life before the Civil War.
“ WARNING: The following post contains wording from the 1800′s that may be disturbing to some readers, it is kept in it’s original entirety”
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."
Solo dancing (outside the context of the big circle dance) is known in various places as buck dance, flatfooting, hoedown, jigging, sure-footing, and stepping. The names vary in meaning, and dancers do not always agree on their use. The term "buck," as in buck dancing, is traceable to the West Indies. One source states that buck dancing was the earliest combination of the basic shuffle and tap steps performed to syncopated rhythms in which accents are placed not on the straight beat, as with the jigs, clogs, and other dances of European origin, but on the downbeat or offbeat, a style derived primarily from the rhythms of African tribal music. Buck dancing was popularized in America by minstrel performers in the late 19th century. Many folk festivals and fairs utilize dancing clubs or teams to perform both Buck and regular clogging for entertainment.
THE FILM: 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 men 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.
Information on this video can be found in the book “Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History” By Constance Valis Hill Page 23 and 24.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clogging#CITEREFAmesSiegelman1977