Card Decorative Items

[Abbie Pilz]

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I am a garbage collector, racist garbage. For three decades I have collected items that defame and belittle Africans and their American descendants. I have a parlor game, "72 Pictured Party Stunts," from the 1930s. One of the game's cards instructs players to, "Go through the motions of a colored boy eating watermelon." The card shows a dark black boy, with bulging eyes and blood red lips, eating a watermelon as large as he is. The card offends me, but I collected it and 4,000 similar items that portray black people as Coons, Toms, Sambos, Mammies, Picaninnies, and other dehumanizing racial caricatures. I collect this garbage because I believe, and know to be true, that items of intolerance can be 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 1970s in Mobile, Alabama, the home of my youth. The item was small, probably a Mammy saltshaker. It must have been cheap because I never had much money. And, it must have been ugly because after I paid the dealer I threw the item to the ground, shattering it. It was not a political act; I, simply, hated it, if you can hate an object. I do not know if he scolded me, he almost certainly did. I was what folks in Mobile, black and white people, indelicately referred to as a "Red Nigger." In those days, in that place, he could have thrown that name at me, without incident. I do not remember what he called me, but I am certain he called me something other than David Pilgrim.

I have a 1916 magazine advertisement that shows a little black 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 sale at $20. The salesclerk wrote, "Black Print," on the receipt. I told her to write, "Nigger Milk Print."

"If you are going to sell it, call it by its name," I told her. She refused. We argued. I bought the print and left. That was my last argument with a dealer or sales clerk; today, I purchase the items and leave with little conversation.

The Mammy saltshaker and the "Nigger Milk" print are not the most offensive items that I have 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 have the $3,000 necessary to purchase it. There are postcards from the first half of the 20th century that show black people being whipped, or worse, hanging dead from trees, or lying on the ground burned beyond recognition. Postcards and photographs of lynched black people sell for around $400 each on eBay and other Internet auction houses. I can afford to buy one, but I am not ready, not yet.

My friends claim that I am obsessed with racist objects. If they are right, the obsession began while I was an undergraduate student at Jarvis Christian College, a small historically black institution in Hawkins, Texas. The teachers taught more than scientific principles and mathematical equations. I learned from them what it was like to live as a black man under Jim Crow segregation. Imagine being a college professor but having to wear a chauffeur's hat while driving your new car through small towns, lest some disgruntled white man beat you 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 time when "social equality" was a profane expression, fighting words. Black people knew their clothing sizes. Why? They were not allowed to try on clothes in department stores. If black and white people wore the same clothes, even for a short while, it implied social equality, and, perhaps, intimacy.

I was 10 years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed; we watched the funeral on a small black and white television in my fifth grade class at Bessie C. Fonville Elementary. All my classmates were black; Mobile was proudly, defiantly segregated. Two years later, in search for a cheaper house, my family moved to Prichard, Alabama, a small adjoining city that was even more segregated. Less than a decade earlier, black people had not been allowed to use the Prichard City Library -- unless they had a note from a white person. White people owned most of the stores. White people held all the elected offices. I was part of the class that integrated Prichard Middle School. A local television commentator called it an "invasion." Invaders? We were children. We fought white adults on the way to school and white children at school. By the time I graduated from Mattie T. Blount High School most of the white people 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 W.E.B. Dubois. More importantly, 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 black people -- all but a few forgotten by history -- who suffered so that I could be 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 it.

All racial groups have been caricatured in this country, but none have been caricatured as often or in as many ways as have black Americans. Black people have 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 Center, said, "derogatory imagery enables people to absorb 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 customs.

Jim Crow was more than a series of "Whites Only" signs. It was a way of life that approximated a racial caste system (Woodward, 1974). Jim Crow laws and etiquette were aided by millions of material objects that portrayed black people as laughable, detestable inferiors. The Coon caricature, for example, depicted black men as lazy, easily frightened, chronically idle, inarticulate, physically ugly idiots. This distorted representation of black men found its way onto postcards, sheet music, children's games, and many other material objects. The Coon and other stereotypical images of black people buttressed the view that black people were unfit to attend racially integrated schools, live in safe neighborhoods, work in responsible jobs, vote, and hold public office. With little effort I can hear the voices of my black elders -- parents, neighbors, teachers -- demanding, almost pleading, "Don't be Coon, be a man." Living under Jim Crow meant battling shame.

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