White Wife Wants to Be Bred by Black Man for Baby
past David Pilgrim, Curator, Jim Crow Museum
As for me, I raced effectually the dumpsters collecting discarded "White" and "Colored" signs, thinking they would be some involvement to posterity in a Museum of Horrors. --Stetson Kennedy i
I am a garbage collector, racist garbage. For iii decades I have nerveless items that defame and scoff Africans and their American descendants. I accept a parlor game, "72 Pictured Party Stunts," from the 1930s. 1 of the game'due south cards instructs players to, "Go through the motions of a colored male child eating watermelon." The card shows a nighttime black boy, with bulging eyes and claret cherry lips, eating a watermelon as large as he is. The menu offends me, but I collected it and iv,000 similar items that portray blacks equally Coons, Toms, Sambos, Mammies, Picaninnies, and other dehumanizing racial caricatures. I collect this garbage considering I believe, and know to be true, that items of intolerance tin can exist used to teach tolerance.
I bought my first racist object when I was 12 or 13. My memory of that event is not perfect. It was the early on 1970s in Mobile, Alabama, the home of my youth. The item was small, probably a Mammy saltshaker. Information technology must take been inexpensive because I never had much coin. And, it must have been ugly because afterward I paid the dealer I threw the item to the ground, shattering it. It was non a political act; I, simply, hated it, if you can detest an object. I do not know if he scolded me, he almost certainly did. I was what folks in Mobile, blacks and whites, indelicately referred to every bit a "Red Nigger." In those days, in that place, he could accept thrown that proper noun at me, without incident. I do non remember what he called me, but I am certain he called me something other than David Pilgrim.
I take a 1916 magazine advertising that shows a trivial blackness boy, softly caricatured, drinking from an ink bottle. The bottom caption reads, "Nigger Milk." I bought the print in 1988 from an antique store in LaPorte, Indiana. It was framed and offered for auction at $xx. The salesclerk wrote, "Black Print," on the receipt. I told her to write, "Nigger Milk Print."
"If you are going to sell it, phone call it by its proper name," I told her. She refused. We argued. I bought the impress and left. That was my last argument with a dealer or sales clerk; today, I buy the items and leave with little conversation.
The Mammy saltshaker and the "Nigger Milk" print are not the nearly offensive items that I accept seen. In 1874, McLoughlin Brothers of New York manufactured a puzzle game called "Chopped Up Niggers." Today, the game is a prized collectible. I have twice seen the game for sale; neither time did I take the $3,000 necessary to purchase it. In that location are postcards from the first half of the 20th century that evidence blacks being whipped, or worse, hanging expressionless from trees, or lying on the ground burned beyond recognition. Postcards and photographs of lynched blacks sell for effectually $400 each on eBay and other Cyberspace auction houses. I can afford to purchase one, but I am not gear up, not all the same.
My friends claim that I am obsessed with racist objects. If they are right, the obsession began while I was an undergraduate educatee at Jarvis Christian Higher, a pocket-size historically black institution in Hawkins, Texas. The teachers taught more than than scientific principles and mathematical equations. I learned from them what it was like to alive as a blackness man under Jim Crow segregation. Imagine being a college professor but having to clothing a chauffeur'southward hat while driving your new car through small towns, lest some disgruntled white man trounce y'all for being "uppity." The stories I heard were not angry ones; no, worse, they were matter-of-fact accounts of everyday life in a land where every black person was considered inferior to every white one, a fourth dimension when "social equality" was a profane expression, fighting words. Blacks knew their clothing sizes. Why? They were non allowed to try on clothes in department stores. If blacks and whites wore the aforementioned clothes, fifty-fifty for a brusque while, information technology implied social equality, and, mayhap, intimacy.
I was 10 years onetime when Martin Luther Rex, Jr. was killed; we watched the funeral on a small black and white idiot box in my fifth course class at Bessie C. Fonville Elementary. All my classmates were black; Mobile was proudly, defiantly segregated. 2 years later, in search for a cheaper house, my family moved to Prichard, Alabama, a modest adjoining city that was even more segregated. Less than a decade earlier, blacks had not been allowed to utilise the Prichard Urban center Library -- unless they had a annotation from a white person. Whites owned most of the stores. Whites held all the elected offices. I was part of the class that integrated Prichard Center School. A local television commentator called information technology an "invasion." Invaders? We were children. We fought adult whites on the way to school and white children at school. By the time I graduated from Mattie T. Blount High Schoolhouse well-nigh of the whites had left the city. When I arrived at Jarvis Christian College I was not naive about southern race relations.
My college teachers taught the usual lessons about Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, and Westward.E.B. Dubois. More chiefly, they taught about the daily heroism of the maids, butlers, and sharecroppers who risked their jobs, and sometimes their lives, to protest Jim Crow segregation. I learned to read history critically, from the "bottom-up," not as a linear critique of so-called great men, but from the viewpoint of oppressed people. I realized the great debt that I owed to the blacks -- all merely a few forgotten by history -- who suffered so that I could exist educated. It was at Jarvis Christian College that I learned that a scholar could be an activist, indeed, must be. Here, I first had the idea of building a collection of racist objects. I was not sure what I would do with information technology.
All racial groups have been caricatured in this country, but none have been caricatured as often or in as many means equally have black Americans. Blacks accept been portrayed in popular culture as pitiable exotics, cannibalistic savages, hypersexual deviants, childlike buffoons, obedient servants, self-loathing victims, and menaces to society. These anti-black depictions were routinely manifested in or on material objects: ashtrays, drinking glasses, banks, games, fishing lures, detergent boxes, and other everyday items. These objects, with racist representations, both reflected and shaped attitudes towards African Americans. Robbin Henderson (Faulkner, Henderson, Fabry, & Miller, 1982), director of the Berkeley Art Centre, said, "derogatory imagery enables people to blot stereotypes; which in turn allows them to ignore and condone injustice, discrimination, segregation, and racism" (p. 11). She was right. Racist imagery is propaganda and that propaganda was used to support Jim Crow laws and community.
Jim Crow was more than than a serial of "Whites Merely" signs. It was a way of life that approximated a racial degree organisation (Woodward, 1974). Jim Crow laws and etiquette were aided by millions of material objects that portrayed blacks as laughable, detestable inferiors. The Coon caricature, for example, depicted black men as lazy, hands frightened, chronically idle, inarticulate, physically ugly idiots. This distorted representation of black men establish its way onto postcards, sheet music, children'south games, and many other fabric objects. The Coon and other stereotypical images of blacks buttressed the view that blacks were unfit to nourish racially integrated schools, live in condom neighborhoods, work in responsible jobs, vote, and hold public office. With petty try I can hear the voices of my blackness elders -- parents, neighbors, teachers -- enervating, almost pleading, "Don't be Coon, be a man." Living under Jim Crow meant contesting shame.
I collected many racist objects during my four years as a graduate student at The Ohio State University. Most of the items were small and inexpensive. I paid $2 for a postcard that showed a terrified blackness man being eaten by an alligator. I paid $5 for a matchbox that showed a Sambo-like character with oversized genitalia. The collection that I amassed was not a sample of what existed in Ohio -- or anywhere; it was, instead, a sample of what I could afford. Brutally racist items were, and remain, the most expensive "blackness collectibles." In Orrville, Ohio, I saw a framed print showing naked blackness children climbing a fence to enter a swimming hole. The caption read, "Last One In'due south A Nigger." I did not have the $125 to buy it. That was the early 1980s, a few years before the prices for racist collectibles escalated. Today, that print, if authentic, sells for several thou dollars. On holiday, I scoured flea markets and antique stores from Ohio to Alabama, looking for items that denigrated black people.
My years at The Ohio State University were, I realize now, filled with much anger. I suppose every sane blackness person must be angry, at least for a while. I was in the Sociology Section, a politically liberal department, and talk most improving race relations was common. There were v or six black students, and nosotros clung together like frightened outsiders. I will non speak for my black colleagues, but I was sincerely doubtful of my white professors' understanding of everyday racism. Their lectures were often vivid, merely never consummate. Race relations were fodder for theoretical debate; blacks were a "enquiry category." Existent blacks, with real ambitions and bug, were problematic. I was suspicious of my white teachers and they reciprocated.
A friend suggested that I have some of my "elective courses" in the Black Studies Plan. I did. James Upton, a Political Scientist, introduced me to Paul Robeson'south book Hither I Stand (1958). Robeson, an achieved athlete and entertainer, was too an activist who believed that American commercialism was pernicious and detrimental to poor people, particularly black Americans. Robeson maintained his political convictions despite ostracism and outright persecution. I was not anti-capitalism, but I admired his willingness to follow his political convictions -- and his unwavering fight for the rights of oppressed people. I read many books virtually race and race relations just few had as much affect on me as Here I Stand up. I read James Baldwin'due south novels and essays. His anger institute a willing ear, but I was troubled by his homosexuality. That is inappreciably surprising. I was reared in a community that was demonstratively homophobic. Homosexuality was seen as weakness, and "sissies" were "bad luck." White bigots exercise non have a monopoly on ignorance. Progressiveness is a journeying. I had a long way to go.
I take long felt that Americans, particularly whites, would rather talk near slavery than Jim Crow. All ex-slaves are expressionless. They exercise not walk among u.s.a., their presence a reminder of that unspeakably cruel arrangement. Their children are expressionless. Distanced by a century and a one-half, the modern American sees slavery as a regrettable menstruum when blacks worked without wages. Slavery was, of course, much worse. It was the complete domination of one people by some other people -- with the expected abuses that back-trail unchecked power. Slavers whipped slaves who displeased them. Clergy preached that slavery was the will of God. Scientists "proved" that blacks were less evolved, a subspecies of the human being race and politicians agreed. Teachers taught young children that blacks were inherently less intelligent. Laws forbade slaves, and sometimes free blacks, from learning to read and write, possessing money, and arguing with whites. Slaves were property -- thinking, suffering belongings. The passing of a century and a half affords the typical American enough "psychological space" to bargain with slavery; when that is non sufficient, a sanitized version of slavery is embraced.
The horrors of Jim Crow are non so easily ignored. The children of Jim Crow walk among u.s.a., and they have stories to tell. They call back Emmett Till, murdered in 1955, for an interchange with a white woman. Long before the tragic bombings of September 11, 2001, blacks who lived under Jim Crow were acquainted with terrorism. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church building, a black church building in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. Twenty-three people were injure, and iv girls were killed. The blacks who grew upwardly during the Jim Crow catamenia tin tell you lot about this bombing -- and many others. Blacks who dared protest the indignities of Jim Crow were threatened, and when the threats did not work, subjected to violence, including bombings. The children of Jim Crow can talk about the Scottsboro boys, the Tuskegee Experiment, lynchings, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and they have stories virtually the daily indignities that befell blacks who lived in towns where they were not respected or wanted.
Aye, many of us would rather talk well-nigh slavery than Jim Crow because a discussion of Jim Crow begs the question: "What near today?"
In 1990 I joined the sociology faculty at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. It was my 2d teaching position and my third "real" job. At that time, my collection of racist artifacts numbered more 1,000. I kept the drove in my habitation, bringing out pieces when I gave public addresses, mainly to high school students. I discovered that many immature people, blacks and whites, were non only ignorant well-nigh historical expressions of racism, but they believed that I was exaggerating when I described the awfulness of Jim Crow. Their ignorance disappointed me. I showed them segregation signs, Ku Klux Klan robes, and everyday objects that portrayed blacks with ragged clothes, unkempt hair, bulging eyes, and clown-similar lips -- running toward fried chicken and watermelons and running away from alligators. I talked to the students about the connection between Jim Crow laws and racist textile objects. I was too heavy-handed, likewise driven to make them understand; I was, that is, learning to use the objects as teaching tools -- while, simultaneously, dealing with my anger.
A seminal event occurred in 1991. A colleague told me about an elderly black woman who had a large collection of blackness-related objects. I volition call her Mrs. Haley. She was an antique dealer in a modest Indiana town. I visited her and told her nearly my drove. She seemed unimpressed. I described how I used the racist objects to teach students well-nigh racism. Once again, she was not impressed. Her shop displayed a few pieces of racist memorabilia. I asked if she kept virtually of the "black material" at her home. She said that she kept those pieces in the back, just I could only meet them if I agreed to a status, namely, I could never "pester" her to sell me whatever of the objects. I agreed. She locked the front door, put the "closed" sign in the window, and motioned for me to follow her.
If I live to be 100 I will never forget the feeling that I had when I saw her collection; information technology was sadness, a thick, cold sadness. In that location were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of objects, side-by-side, on shelves that reached to the ceiling. All four walls were covered with some of the virtually racist objects imaginable. I owned some of the objects, others I had seen in Blackness Memorabilia price guides, and others were so rare I have not seen them since. I was stunned. Sadness. It was as if I could hear the pieces talking, yowling. Every believable distortion of black people, our people, was on display. It was a chamber of horrors. She did not talk. She stared at me; I stared at the objects. One was a life-sized wooden figure of a black human being, grotesquely caricatured. It was a testament to the creative energy that often lurks behind racism. On her walls was a textile record of all the hurt and harm done to Africans and their American descendants. I wanted to weep. It was at that moment that I decided to create a museum.
I visited her often. She liked me because I was "from down home." She told me that in the 1960s and 1970s many whites gave her racist objects. They did not want to be identified with racism. They were embarrassed. That sentiment inverse in the mid-1980s. Several price guides devoted solely to racist collectibles were published. The price guides helped create the contemporary marketplace for racist collectibles. Each new price guide showed prices escalating, and a national pursuit of racist items ensued. Mrs. Haley'due south collection was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but she had no want to sell the pieces. They were our past, America'due south past. "We mustn't forget, infant," she said, without fifty-fifty a hint of anger. I stopped visiting after a twelvemonth or and then, she died, and I heard that her collection was sold to private dealers. That broke my heart on several levels. It bothers me that she did not live to see the museum she helped inspire.
I connected to collect racist objects: musical records with racist themes, fishing lures with Sambo imagery, children's games that showed naked, dingy black children -- whatsoever and every racist item that I could afford. In the cold months I bought from antique stores; in the warmer months, I traveled to flea markets. I was impatient. I sought to purchase entire collections from dealers and collectors. Again, express finances restricted me to purchasing only small collections.
In 1994 I was role of a three-person team from Ferris State University that attended a two-week workshop at Colorado Higher, in Colorado Springs. The conference, sponsored past the Lilly Foundation, was devoted to the liberal arts. The charge to our squad was to introduce "multifariousness" into the general educational activity curriculum at Ferris State Academy. I traveled with Mary Murnik, a colleague, to all the local antique stores. Colorado Springs is a politically conservative city, not surprisingly, there were many racist items for sale -- some vintage, many reproductions. I bought several segregation signs, a Coon Craven Inn drinking glass, three racist ashtrays, and many other items. I also bought several 1920s records, all with racist themes, from a dealer who tried to talk about "the problem with colored people." I wanted the records; I did not desire the conversation. John Thorp, the other member of the team, and I spent hours planning a strategy to convince the Ferris Land University administration to give physical infinite and money to a room that would firm my racist collectibles. Information technology took several years but he and I were successful.
Today, I am the founder and curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University. Most collectors are soothed past their collections; I hated mine and was relieved to go it out of my dwelling house. I donated my entire drove to the university, with the condition that the objects would exist displayed and preserved. I never liked having the objects in my abode. I had small children. They would wander to the basement and look at "daddy'southward dolls" -- two mannequins dressed in full Ku Klux Klan regalia. They played with the racist target games. One of them, I practice not know which, bankrupt a "Tom" cookie jar. I was angry for two days. The irony is non lost to me.
The museum will function as a educational activity laboratory. Ferris State University faculty and students use the museum to understand historical expressions of racism. The museum also includes items created afterwards the Jim Crow period ended; this is a valuable improver considering also many students were dismissing racism as a "affair of the by." Scholars conducting research, mainly social scientists, also visit the museum. Only rarely are children allowed in the room, and adults -- preferably their parents -- are encouraged to accompany them. We encourage all visitors to watch Marlon Rigg's documentary, Indigenous Notions (Riggs, 1987) or Jim Crow's Museum (Pilgrim & Rye, 2004), a documentary I produced and Clayton Rye directed before entering the room. A trained museum facilitator is there for all tours. Clergy, civil rights groups and human rights organizations too visit the museum.
The mission of the Jim Crow Museum is straightforward: use items of intolerance to teach tolerance. We examine the historical patterns of race relations and the origins and consequences of racist depictions. The aim is to engage visitors in open and honest dialogues about this country's racial history. We are non agape to talk nearly race and racism; we are afraid not to. I continue to deliver public presentations at high schools and colleges. Race relations suffer when discussions of race and racism are verboten. High schools that "sincerely" include race, racism, and variety in their curriculums increase tolerance for others. It is relatively easy to identify those high schools that are afraid or unwilling to honestly examine race and racism. There you volition notice a 1950s-similar design of everyday race relations. Racial stereotypes will dominate, though they may become unspoken. Inevitably, there will be a "racial incident," -- a racial slur hurled, a fight blamed on "the other," -- and at that place volition be no relevant foundation laid for dealing with the problem, other than hiring me or a similar "diversity consultant" to restore social club. The Jim Crow Museum is founded on the belief that open, honest, even painful discussions about race are necessary to avoid yesterday's mistakes.
Our goal is not to shock visitors. A thick naivet'e nigh America's by permeates this state. Many Americans understand historical racism mainly every bit a general brainchild: Racism existed; it was bad, though probably not every bit bad as blacks and other minorities claim. A confrontation with the visual evidence of racism -- peculiarly thousands of items in a pocket-sized room -- is frequently shocking, even painful. In the tardily 1800s traveling carnivals and entertainment parks sometimes included a game called "Hit the Coon." A black man would stick his caput through a hole in a painted canvas; the background was a plantation scene. White patrons would throw balls -- and in especially brutal instances, rocks -- at the black human being's head to win prizes. A person living in the 21st century who sees that banner or a reproduction gets a glimpse of what it was similar to be a black human in the early on years of Jim Crow.
That carnival banner reinforced the idea that blacks were non as human as whites. It alleviated white guilt near black pain; information technology suggested that blacks did not feel pain the way normal people -- whites -- experienced hurting. It helped legitimize "happy violence" directed against blacks. It functioned as an ego heave for the white hurlers. How many poorly paid, socially marginalized whites expressed their frustration at the expense of "black heads?" The "Hit the Coon" game and its cousin, "African Dodger," were somewhen replaced with target games that used wooden blackness heads. You practise non have to be a psychologist to empathise the symbolic violence. Not coincidentally, games that used blacks every bit targets were pop when the lynching of real blacks was increasing in frequency. The Jim Crow Museum has many objects that show blacks being thrown at, hit, or beaten. We exercise not accept the funfair imprint -- just I could teach a lot with one.
Some truths are painful
Anger is a necessary leg on many journeys, merely it cannot exist the destination. My anger reached its apex when I read The Turner Diaries (1978), written past William L. Pierce, penname Andrew MacDonald.2 The book chronicles the "heroism" of white supremacists who overthrow the federal government, win a bloody race war, and establish a social order where whites dominion. Blacks, other minorities, and the whites who back up them are brutally, graphically killed. This book, arguably the nearly racist volume produced in the 2nd half of the 20th century, has influenced numerous racist organizations, including The Order and The Aryan Republican Army. Timothy McVeigh, bedevilled of the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma Metropolis, was a fan of the volume -- and his bombing was eerily like to bombings described in The Turner Diaries. I made the mistake of reading information technology -- all 80,000 words -- in one day, while I was tired. It consumed me.
Pierce, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado, bonded with Nazis in the 1960s. That explains why he wrote the book, but why did it acrimony me and so much? I had, after all, a basement total of racist memorabilia. I was raised in the segregated Southward. I remember the race riots on Davis Avenue in Mobile, Alabama. I was familiar with the many ways that y'all can phone call me a nigger and threaten to hurt me. The ideas in Pierce's book, though venomous, were not new to me. Nevertheless, that book shook me.
Most that fourth dimension, I took a colleague's students into the Jim Crow Museum. I showed them the ugliness, the Mammy, the Sambo, the Fauna, the caricatured sores foisted on black Americans. I showed them. Showed it all. And nosotros went deep, deeper than e'er before, deeper than I meant to get. My anger showed. After three hours they left, all only two -- a young black woman and a center-aged white man. The woman sat, paralyzed, transfixed, and stunned before a picture of four naked black children. The children sabbatum on a riverbank. At the bottom of the pic were these words: "Alligator Allurement." She sat there, watching it, trying to empathise the mitt that had made it, the mind that conceived information technology. She did not say a word, but her optics, her frown, the hand at her brow all said, "Why, sweet Jesus, why?" The white man stopped staring at the items and stared at me. He was crying. Non a sob, a single tear stream. His tears moved me. I walked toward him. Earlier I could talk, he said, "I am sorry, Mr. Pilgrim. Please forgive me."
He had non created the racist objects in the room, but he had benefited from living in a club where blacks were oppressed. Racial healing follows sincere contrition. I never realized how much I needed to hear some white person, whatever sincere white person, say, "I am deplorable, forgive me." I wanted and needed an apology -- a heartfelt one that changes two lives. His words took the steam out of my anger. The Jim Crow Museum was not created to shock, shame, or acrimony, but to lead to a deeper understanding of the historical racial divide. Some visitors to the museum say that I seemed then detached; I am not, I have struggled to harness my anger and channel it into productive work.
Near people who visit the Jim Crow Museum understand our mission, accept our methods, and continue the journey toward understanding and improving race relations. But we accept critics. That is to be expected. The 21st century has brought a fear and unwillingness to wait at racism in a deep, systematic fashion. The hedonistic desire to avoid pain (or anything uncomfortable) is counter to our method of directly against the ugly legacy of racism. Moreover, there is a growing desire among many Americans to forget the by and move forward. "If we just stop talking about historical racism, racism volition go abroad." It is not that easy. Nosotros may not talk openly about race, only that is non the aforementioned as forgetting it. America remains a nation residentially segregated by race. Our churches, temples, and synagogues are, in the chief, racially divided. Old patterns of racial segregation take returned to many public schools. Race matters. Racial stereotypes, sometimes yelled, sometimes whispered, are mutual. Overt racism has morphed into institutional racism, symbolic racism, and everyday racialism. Attitudes and beliefs about race inform many of our decisions, big and small. "Let's cease talking most it," is a plea for comfort -- a comfort denied to blacks and other minorities. The way to move forrard is to confront the historical and the gimmicky expressions of racism, and to do and so in a setting where attitudes, values, and behaviors are critiqued.
Several visitors to the museum have asked, "Why don't y'all have any positive items in hither?" My answer is unproblematic: we are, in effect, a black holocaust museum. I hateful no disrespect to the millions of Jews and others who died at the easily of the maniacal Adolf Hitler and his followers. I hesitate to use the discussion "holocaust" to describe the experiences of Africans and their American descendants because I do non desire to trivialize the suffering of Jews -- nor do I want to compare victimizations. Simply what give-and-take should I use? Thousands of Africans died during the Trans-Atlantic slave voyage. Many more lived nether the brutal organization of slavery, and even later on slavery was officially concluded thousands of blacks were lynched -- many ritualistically, by white mobs. We have today many small "white towns" that were created considering the blacks were "driven out," victims of wanton racial violence.
When the Jim Crow Museum moves into a larger facility 3 additional "stories" will be told. Artifacts and signage will innovate visitors to the wonderful accomplishments of black scholars, scientists, artists, and inventors who thrived despite living under Jim Crow. Also, a "Civil Rights Movement" section volition be added. There, visitors volition find images of protestors, with signs maxim, "I, As well, Am A Man." Visitors volition learn about civil rights workers, many of whom are not found in history books. This department can exist conceptualized as a "Expiry of Jim Crow" flow, though vestiges of Jim Crow era thinking remain. Finally, there will exist a room of reflection. I envision a mural of civil rights martyrs, from all races, surrounding visitors as they ask the important question, "What can I do today to address racism?" These will be positive sections. We likewise programme to enlarge photographs of blacks being "regular" people: eating, walking, studying or simply living. These affiche-sized images will be placed nigh the caricatured objects and then that visitors remember that the thousands of objects that denigrate blacks are distortions, hateful-spirited exaggerations -- they are not realistic depictions. There will be several kiosks with stories from people who lived under Jim Crow.
Jim Crow was wounded in the 1950s and 1960s. The Supreme Court decision, Brownish five. Lath of Education of Topeka (1954) ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. This hastened the stop of legal segregation, but it did non cease information technology, as evidenced by the need for the Civil Rights Motility. Whites, especially northerners, were confronted with images of black protestors being browbeaten by police officers, attacked by police force dogs, and arrested for trying to vote, eat at segregated tiffin counters, and attend "white" schools. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, passed subsequently (and maybe considering of) President John F. Kennedy's death, was certainly a blow to Jim Crow.
1 by 1 segregation laws were removed in the 1960s and 1970s. The elimination of legal barriers to voting led to the election of blackness politicians in many cities, including former bastions of segregation such as Birmingham and Atlanta. From this menses forward, white colleges and universities in the South admitted black students, and hired blackness professors, admitting often a token number. Affirmative activity programs forced employers in both the public and private sectors to hire blacks and other minorities. Some blacks appeared on television shows in non-stereotypical ways. Pregnant racial problems remained but it seemed that Jim Crow era attitudes and behaviors were destined to die. Many whites destroyed their household items that defamed black people, for example, ashtrays with smiling Sambos, "Jolly Nigger" banks, sheet music with titles like "Coon, Coon, Coon," and children' s books like Petty Black Sambo.
Jim Crow attitudes did not die; and in many instances, have resurfaced. The cease of the 20th century found many whites resentful of the "gains" by blacks. Affirmative Action policies were attacked every bit reverse discrimination against whites. The slavery-era Coon caricature of blacks as lazy, ne'er-exercise-wells re-emerged as a depiction of modernistic welfare recipients. White Americans support welfare for the "deserving poor," but strongly oppose information technology for persons perceived every bit lazy and unwilling to work. Black welfare recipients are seen every bit indolent parasites. The centuries-erstwhile fright of blacks, especially immature black males, every bit brutes found new life in contemporary portrayals of blacks as thugs, gangsters, and menaces to society.
Black entertainers who capitalize financially on white America'south credence of anti-black stereotypes perpetuate many of these images. In popular and material civilisation, the Mammy portrayal of black women was replaced past the Jezebel prototype: black women as hypersexual deviants. The racial sensitivity that had been promoted in the 1970s and 1980s was past the end of the century derided as "political correctness."
The new racial climate is marked by ambivalence and contradiction. Most polls most race show a decline in prejudice among whites. There remains a heightened sense that racism is incorrect and that tolerating "racial others" is proficient; however, there is a growing acceptance of ideas critical of and belittling toward blacks and other minorities. Many whites are tired of talking about race, believing that America has made plenty "concessions" to its black citizens. Some are rebelling against government intrusion, arguing that the government, especially the federal government, does non have the right to forcefulness integration. Notwithstanding others wage personal battles against political correctness. And and then at that place is that segment of the white population that still believes that blacks are less intelligent, less ambitious, less moral, and more given to social pathological behaviors: drug corruption, sexual deviance, and crimes against property and persons. Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr., vilified during his life, is hailed as a hero; blacks as a whole are viewed with suspicion, sometimes alarm.
In the early 1990s I attended an bookish conference in New Orleans. I searched local stores for racist objects. There were not many. Ten years later I returned to New Orleans. I institute anti-black objects in many stores. This is disappointing but not surprising. Brutally racist items are readily available through Internet auction houses, most notably eBay. Indeed, practically every particular housed in the Jim Crow Museum is existence sold on some Internet site. Quondam racist items are beingness reproduced and new items are being created. Each year, Halloween United states produces monster masks by exaggerating the features of Africans and African Americans.
In 2003, David Chang created a national uproar with his game, Ghettopoly. Unlike Monopoly, the popular family unit game, Ghettopoly debases and belittles racial minorities, especially blacks. Ghettopoly has vii game pieces: Pimp, Hoe, 40 oz, Machine Gun, Marijuana Leaf, Basketball game, and Fissure. One of the game'south cards reads, "Yous got yo whole neighborhood fond to crack. Collect $50 from each playa." Monopoly has houses and hotels; Ghettopoly has crack houses and projects. The distributors advertise Ghettopoly this manner: "Ownership stolen properties, pimpin hoes, building crevice houses and projects, paying protection fees and getting car jacked are some of the elements of the game. Non dope enough? If you don't accept the money that you owe to the loan shark yous might just state yourself in da Emergency Room." The game's cards depict blacks in physically caricatured ways. Hasbro, the owner of the copyright for Monopoly, has sued David Chang to brand him cease distributing Ghettopoly.
David Chang promotes his product every bit a satirical critique of American racism. He is not alone. AdultDolls.internet is the distributor of Trash Talker Dolls, a prepare of dolls with stereotypical depictions of minorities. Their best seller is Pimp Daddy, a concatenation-wearing, gaudily dressed, black pimp who says, among other things, "You better make some money, bitch." Charles Knipp, a white man, has gained national notoriety for his minstrel-elevate "Ignunce Tour." Knipp, dressed in ragged women'southward clothes and blackface makeup, adopts the stage persona Shirley Q. Liquor -- a Coon-like blackness woman with xix children. This self-proclaimed "Queen of Dixie" has many skits -- each portraying all blacks equally buffoons, whores, idlers, and crooks. Knipp'south performances are popular in the Deep South; however, he has been protested in many northern cities (Boykin, 2002). Shirley Q. Liquor collectibles -- including cassette tapes, drinking glasses, and posters are popular. When satire does non work, it promotes the thing satirized. Ghettopoly, Trash Talker Dolls, and Shirley Q. Liquor skits and products portray blacks as immoral, wretched, sick-bred, cultural parasites. These modern depictions of blacks are reminiscent of the negative caricatures constitute more than than a century ago. The satire does not work but the distributors become paid.
Understanding is the principal thing. The Jim Crow Museum'southward holdings force visitors to accept a stand up for or confronting the equality of all people. It works. I have witnessed deep and honest discussions about race and racism. No topics are forbidden. What office take blacks played in perpetuating anti-black caricatures and stereotypes? When, if e'er, is folk art racially offensive? Is segregation forth racial lines always indicative of racism? Nosotros analyze the origins and consequences of racist imagery, simply we do non stop at that place.
I am humbled that the Jim Crow Museum has become a national resource -- and the museum's Web site, an international resource. The Spider web site was created by Ted Halm, the Ferris State University webmaster. Two dozen Ferris Land University faculty have been trained to function every bit docents -- leading tours and facilitating discussions nigh the objects. Traveling exhibits are being conceptualized and built to carry the museum'southward lessons to other universities and colleges. Clayton Rye, a Ferris Country University professor and filmmaker, and I created a documentary about the museum. John Thorp served the museum well as its managing director until his retirement, as does current director Joseph "Andy" Karafa. The museum is a team effort. A vision without assist is a cathartic dream.
I meet my role equally decreasing. I have other goals, other garbage to collect. I have collected several hundred objects that defame and belittle women -- items that both reflected and shaped negative attitudes toward women. One day I will build a room, modeled after the Jim Crow Museum, that uses sexist objects to teach Americans to better sympathize sexism. That room volition be called "The Sarah Baartman Room," named subsequently a 19th century African adult female brutally mistreated past her European captors. Her victimization was a "perfect" analogy of the links between racism, sexism and imperialism. At that place is an African saying that says that we do not dice until we are forgotten. It is my intention that Sarah Baartman never dies.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." In 2004, Carrie Weis, the Director of the FSU Art Gallery, and I designed and built a traveling exhibit chosen, "Hateful Things." This exhibit has traveled to many universities and museums teaching well-nigh the horrors of Jim Crow segregation. In 2005 we began building, "Them," a traveling exhibit that focuses on material objects that defame non-blacks, including women, Asians, Jews, Mexicans, and poor whites. Once again, our goal is to use items of intolerance to teach tolerance.
I will end with a story. One of my daughters plays on an elite soccer squad, meaning her practices are never done on time. One solar day I saturday in the van with my other daughter waiting for practice to end. Nearby several white boys were clowning in front of ii girls. They were all teenagers. One of the boys wore a blackfaced mask and he mocked the mannerisms of "street blacks." He turned toward united states of america and I immediately looked at my daughter. She had lowered her head and covered her face. If yous have a child then yous know what I felt. If your skin is nighttime then you know why I practice what I do.
© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology
Ferris State University
Feb., 2005
Edited 2012
1 Kennedy (1990, p. 234). This book, originally published in 1959, is a profound-admitting, often satirical-critique of the racial hierarchy that operated during the Jim Crow period.
2 As founder of the National Alliance, the largest neo-Nazi organization in this land, Pierce used weekly radio addresses, the Net, white power music ventures, and racist video games to promote his vision of a whites-only homeland and a authorities free of "non-Aryan influence." Pierce died on July 23, 2002, his followers have vowed to behave on his work.
References
Boykin, Thousand. (2002). Knipped in the butt: Protests close NYC drag 'minstrel' prove. Retrieved from http://www.keithboykin.com/articles/shirleyq1.html.
Faulkner, J., Henderson, R., Fabry, F., & Miller, A.D. (1982). Ethnic notions: Black images In the white mind: An exhibition of racist stereotype and caricature from the collection of Janette Faulkner: September 12-November 4, 1982. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Art Middle. The images in this book inspired Marlon Riggs' documentary, Indigenous Notions.
Kennedy, S. (1959/1990). Jim Crow guide: The way it was. Boca Raton, FL: Florida Atlantic Academy Printing.
Macdonald, A., & Cypher, D. (1978). The Turner diaries. Washington, D.C.: National Alliance.
Pilgrim, D. (Producer), & Rye, C. (Director). (2004). Jim Crow's museum [Motion moving picture]. The states: Grim Rye Productions.
Riggs, M. (Producer/Director). (1987). Ethnic notions [Motion moving picture]. United states of america: Signifyin' Works.
Robeson, P. (1958). Hither I stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Printing.
Woodward, C. V. (1974). The strange career of Jim Crow (3rd rev. ed). New York, NY: Oxford Academy Press. This book remains a classic critique of Jim Crow laws and etiquette.
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Source: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/collect.htm
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