![]() ![]() Shelved in the museum alongside the many stereotypical representations of "pickaninnies" (a racial slur applied to African-American youngsters) speaking fractured English, eating watermelon, catching opossums, etc., are similar cartoonish portrayals of black children (and sometimes black adults) as worthless "alligator bait." In a chapter by that name in her 2002 book Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture, UCLA folklorist and African American studies professor Patricia Turner wrote that such artifacts "depict more than just the presence of a negative stereotype they implicitly represent a form of aggression in eradicating an unwanted people." One of the most frequently cited sources for said documentation is the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, which does, in fact, house artifacts (e.g., postcards, knickknacks, and product packaging, and the like) demonstrating how pervasive derogatory imagery of black people was in American popular culture right up through the mid-20th century. It has been pretty well documented recently that, during slavery and into the 20th Century, black babies were used as alligator bait in North and Central Florida. Which is why these sick hunters had no regard for human life! The alligator hunters kidnapped black infants, skinned them alive, and tied their neck to a string and dropped them into a swamp! Dangling them near the mouths of hungry 700 pound alligators! These black babies were stolen, caged and fed to alligators whole! The activity is retold in various forms in researched documents, many found in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia in Michigan.Ī 2014 article in the Miami New Times agreed that these claims are supported by good research: During the slave era, our ancestors in America were only considered 3/5 of a human being. ![]() These alligator hunters needed to lure the larger bull alligators with human flesh and blood. These white people were sick beyond belief. ![]() "Alligator Bait" is the term drives from an activity conducted by white men, mostly in the swamps of Louisiana and Florida throughout the south. The Internet is a wonderful tool for learning, but sometimes the most important lesson it teaches us is that we can't take the information we find there for granted.Ī tidbit of historical trivia making the social media rounds since the late 2000s purports to reveal a shocking and little-known example of racist cruelty in the United States' past, namely that profit-seeking white hunters in the deep South of the 19th and early 20th centuries used black "slave babies" to lure alligators out of the swamps to be killed so that their skins could be harvested:Īmong other places, these claims are elaborated on in an April 2012 forum post asserting that black infants were not only routinely served up as alligator bait, but horribly "skinned alive" in preparation for it: ![]()
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