I do know that the banjo is only just coming back into use among a few african americans after many years of repugnance from it's association with black faced white minstrels.

The first part of this sentence is certainly correct but I wonder about the second part. I think that the 1960s black consciousness movement in the USA turned its back on early black banjo music as well as the blues because they considered it to be "slave music". They wanted to be associated with "Soul" music and the more sophisticated side of Gospel music. It has taken a different generation led by the superb Carolina Chocolate Drops to reclaim their heritage in those early days of black American music.
I remember being totally bowled over by the CCD on their first tour. Two memories stand out from that concert. One was when Dom Flemons told us that even the black performers were expected to black up in those Medicine tent shows and Hokum concerts. It was these sources that the CCDs were reviving. The other was when Rhiannon Giddens came to the mic and said that many of the plantation owners in her area of North Carolina were Scots driven out during the highland clearances and earlier and they expected their slaves to learn their Gaelic language, songs and music. She then sung a lament in Gaelic that had been collected from a black woman in North Carolina. Afterwards I rushed up to a fiddle-playing Gaelic-speaking friend of mine who was in the audience and asked him what her accent was like. "Pretty damn good!" was his opinion.

The problem is that social history can sometimes seem to have a very short span; I was interviewing Guy Davis the excellent American blues singer, guitarist and banjo player before the "Reclaiming the Banjo" tour and he said:-
"When I was a kid and first heard the blues, I thought it was the music of young Brits in electric bands. They seemed to be the only ones playing it."