Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Understanding Jim Crow
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1959
WEBSITE:
CITY: Big Rapids
STATE: MI
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/administration/president/DiversityOffice/staff/bio.htm * http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/ * http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/02/david-pilgrim-understanding-jim-crow-racist-collectibles * http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/03/qa-david-pilgrim-jim-crow-museum-of-racist-memorabilia-curator/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1959.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Ferris State University, Big Rapids, MI, instructor, founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, 1996—.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Daivd Pilgrim is an instructor at Ferris State University, where he is also the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. When Pilgrim was a child at a flea market, he saw racist salt shakers, bought them, and smashed them in front of the previous owner. As a young black man, Pilgrim was disgusted by the offensive memirobilia, and he’s since dedicated his life to collecting it. His museum is meant to facilitate discussion and understanding, to document the ways in which racist artifacts were used to normalize and sustain the Jim Crow era. Pilgrim’s book, Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice sets out to do the same, and it features color photos of the items Pilgrim’s collection. The book also features discussion of how these items worked to legitimize prejudice.
As the author explained in a Mother Jones Online interview with Dave Gilson, “these toys, games, sheet music about ‘coons’ and ‘darkies’—all these millions, and I mean literally millions, of objects—were integral to maintaining Jim Crow. Jim Crow could not work without violence, real violence, but also the threat of violence and the depiction of violence. There are a number of games in the museum where you throw things at black people: ‘hit the nigger’ or ‘hit the Negro’ games. If you had such a game, you were actually creating safe spaces to do that.”
Indeed, online Truthout correspondent Bill Berkowitz found that “Understanding Jim Crow contains images of racist book covers, cereal and soapboxes, dishes, endless sets of postcards, greeting cards, records, minstrel joke books and sheet music, and other examples of racist memorabilia. However, it is Pilgrim’s thoughtful and passionately told story that makes the book more than just another, albeit unique, history of US racism. Essentially, the book is about Pilgrim’s dedication to turning garbage collecting into tools for teaching about racism.” Able Greenspan, writing in MBR Bookwatch, was also impressed, and he found that “Understanding Jim Crow is both a grisly tour through America’s past and an auspicious starting point for racial understanding and healing.” As F.W. Gleach put it in Choice, this is “an amazing, wonderful, and important book.” Offering furry applause in the Journal of Southern History, P. Nicole King announced: “Pilgrim’s book is an important read for publicly engaged scholars. . . . Understanding Jim Crow functions as a traveling exhibition, expanding the reach and audience of the museum. Some of the images in Pilgrim’s book are disturbing. However, that is the point.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, F.W. Gleach, review of Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, P. Nicole King, review of Understanding Jim Crow.
MBR Bookwatch, December, 2015, Able Greenspan, review of Understanding Jim Crow.
ONLINE
Mother Jones Online, http://www.motherjones.com/ (July 2, 2017), Dave Gilson, author interview.
Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/ (January 9, 2016), Bill Berkowitz, review of Understanding Jim Crow.*
May 3rd, 2012
01:14 PM ET
Q&A: David Pilgrim, Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia curator
By Stephanie Siek, CNN
(CNN) – Generations of Americans have grown up intimately acquainted with stereotypes of African-Americans, from “mammies” serving Aunt Jemima pancakes, to “Little Black Sambo” at evening story time. In between, people could use washing powder, notepads, ashtrays, tea towels, sugar bowls, swizzle sticks and tobacco marketed with images of African-Americans portrayed as not only mammies and sambos, but dimwitted jungle savages, google-eyed golliwogs, lewdly sexual Jezebels, watermelon-eating pickaninnies and lazy Stepin’ Fetchits. Racist objects were used to open beer bottles, dust lint from coats, hold doors, catch ashes from cigarettes and lure fish, especially in the early 20th century.
The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia owns thousands of items that illustrate these and other stereotypes and attitudes about African-Americans. Housed for About 15 years in a small unused classroom at Big Rapids, Michigan’s Ferris State University, it moved into a $1.3 million, 3,500-square foot campus space in April.
“I used to claim if you named an object, I could find a racist version of it,” said David Pilgrim, Ferris State University vice president for diversity and inclusion, who created and now curates the museum.
Pilgrim, a sociology professor, said he hopes that the museum can one day serve as a place where visitors can witness and deconstruct all kinds of stereotypes. The collection includes objects that denigrate women, gays and lesbians, Mexican-Americans and Native Americans.
People often criticize or question the museum, and say it's best the materials are forgotten. Museum organizers say they're sometimes accused of promoting racism. Pilgrim agrees the museum's collection is offensive, and says the problems of the present can't be analyzed without remembering the past.
Here's what he had to say about the museum's origins and mission.
CNN: How many artifacts are currently in the museum’s collection?
David Pilgrim: Our collection is probably about 9,000 items – and maybe half of that is being displayed. I’ll give you some general categories – the biggest is anti-black caricature objects. And then we have what I would call segregation memorabilia (such as “white only” signs). The other category is what we might call “positive” pieces or African-American heritage pieces – civil rights memorabilia, Negro League baseball memorabilia, articles about African-American achievement.
We also have a couple thousand pieces on other groups. We have a showcase outside where we’ve placed objects about the stereotyping of Native Americans and women, to send the message that this is the next leg of the journey. I never had it as an intention in recent years that this would be the final place we built. We were in a small room, a 500-square foot room, before the renovation – and I’d like to start putting some of that material in there, and I’d like to build those collections, especially some of the material on women.
CNN: Where did you find all these objects?
Pilgrim: For most of my life, I collected in flea markets. It is certainly true that once the internet exploded that became the primary way that I collected. But I’ve also gone into peoples’ homes, purchased other peoples’ collection. We’re now in a position where some people are donating their collections. But in terms of me reaching in my pocket and purchasing – most of that has been in flea markets, antique stores or internet auctions like ebay and Yahoo.
CNN: Do you remember the first piece of racist memorabilia you acquired? How did you get it?
Pilgrim: I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and (in the early 1970s) when I was 12 or 13, I was at one of those hybrid flea markets-slash-carnival type deals; they had merchants that had all sort of stuff they were selling. One guy, in addition to the other stuff, was selling “Mammy” salt and pepper shakers. I bought them, and I broke them… Just threw them down right in front of him. I guess I had the makings of an activist even then. Or I had the makings of a jerk.
I do not remember (reaction of the seller.) This would have been the early '70s or something, at that time he could have pretty much called me whatever he wanted to. It’s almost surreal, I remember things about the day, it being very hot, the smell from these sausage-type things making me queasy. I remember these were sitting on the edge of the table, and I remember breaking it, but I don’t remember anything else. I don’t want to take too much credit – it might also be the fact that it was just ugly, and that he (a white vendor) was selling it. I don’t think anyone can think of an incident more in life than I can of that one.
CNN: When did acquiring these objects cross the line from being a hobby to being a more organized collection?
Pilgrim: When I was an undergrad I started giving lectures to community groups - I saw the power of a visual aid - I was speaking to all black audiences at that time, and they all got it. Some people would give me things. Other than the first time, I don’t think I was ever sort of a liberator collector - someone liberating it from the merchant or the larger society. At least not consciously. It started in a fledgling kind of way, using this to educate, and then became more about that. It’s just the power - a picture is worth a thousand words, but a three-dimensional object got to be worth at least that too.
CNN: What is the best argument for retaining these kind of racist artifacts and displaying them? Why do we need to remember?
Pilgrim: One of the interesting things (critics say) is the idea that we’re a shrine to racism - in a very real sense, that’s like saying a hospital is a shrine to disease. It’s silly. But I do understand that many Americans prefer not to discuss race in a setting where their ideas are challenged. We don’t like talking about some periods of history, but if we don’t do that, we’re not a mature nation, and that’s not a mature education.
In the same sense, it’s consistent with more of an eyes-on, hands-on teaching approach.
We are doing it in almost the opposite way that a lot of people approach race - we’re not only not avoiding it, we’re dealing with it in the most direct way you could imagine.
If you look at any measure - any survey, any poll that dealt with attitudes whites had toward blacks, and you look at the stereotypes that existed, those were all reflected in material culture. They become a barometer of the attitudes and abuses directed at African-Americans. If you look today, you’ll see for some percentage of the white psyche, the stereotypes and caricatures are reflected in the pieces. I think what’s more damaging isn’t just that they reflected existing stereotypes, but that they shaped attitudes and values to come as related to blacks. We show cartoons in the museum from the '30s, '40s, '50s. Imagine you were a child and watching those – they’re not just reflecting (contemporary attitudes), they’re also shaping (future ones).
CNN: You have a huge amount of acquisitions that reflect the pre-civil-rights-era. What are some of the most recent objects in the museum?
Pilgrim: People are surprised to see objects made just five years ago. I can’t say it’s the newest because we acquire new stuff every day, but it includes the anti-Obama presidential election stuff. We did buy a miniature President Obama lawn jockey. There’s no shortage of new examples. If you go to Café Press, TShirtHell.com and ebay, there’s stuff being cranked out like you wouldn’t believe. Some of the new stuff are reproductions of old stuff. Not just to look the same, but taking the old image, from "Nigger Hair Tobacco,” for example, and placing it on the face of a clock. Old image, new object. There’s also the “Plain Brown Rapper” – this Halloween mask.
And if there’s a race-based incident that occurs nationally, within one week we will own a material object pertaining to it. With Don Imus’ unfortunate remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, within three days we had racist stuff related to that.
CNN: How have you seen these stereotypical representations of African-Americans change over the years?
Pilgrim: Some of the old objects are being reproduced exactly as they were, because there’s a market for that. I can find a mammy cookie jar that looks exactly like one from 1920. But also you see other kinds of caricature - like the image of the brute – the black young man portrayed as criminals and menaces and rapists and whatever else. That image in the 1920s and '30s would have shown a nappy-haired black guy with a razor in his hand. Today you’d see a guy with a gun in his hand, dressed in the manner of hip-hop culture. But it’s the same stereotype.
One major difference today is that there is now a market for positive images of African-Americans. But there are some periods where you really have to hustle to find a lot of mass-produced positive images. But now there’s an incredible market of positive material out there, what I call redemptive pieces. Statues or busts or sculptures of not just real African-Americans, but African-American young people in graduation gowns.
CNN: What do you hope people take away from their visit to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia?
Pilgrim: It’s going to sound mawkish, but I really do believe in the triumph of dialogue, otherwise I couldn’t be in higher education. I hope we’ve created an intelligent space where people can talk about race and learn about race. When it’s all said and done we’re an academic resource. This is just another way to teach.
These Racist Collectibles Will Make Your Skin Crawl
And they’re still being made.
Dave GilsonMarch/April 2016 issue
DAVID PILGRIM bought his first piece of racist memorabilia in the early 1970s, when he was a youngster in Mobile, Alabama. It was a set of salt and pepper shakers meant to caricature African Americans. “I purchased it and broke it” on purpose, recalls Pilgrim, who is black. Yet over the next few decades, he amassed a sizable collection of what he calls “contemptible collectibles”—once-common household objects and products that mock and stereotype black people.
David Pilgrim Ferris State University
PM Press
In 1996, Pilgrim transformed his 3,200-item collection into the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Michigan’s Ferris State University, where he teaches sociology. He presents a selection of these appalling objects and images in his new book, Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice. As the title implies, the book isn’t merely an exercise in shock value. It lays out the philosophy behind Pilgrim’s work as a scholar and an activist: that only by acknowledging these artifacts and their persistence in American culture can we honestly confront our not-so-distant past.
Mother Jones: What made you decide to turn your collection into a museum?
David Pilgrim: When I got to Michigan, someone mentioned that they knew this elderly black woman who was an antiques dealer. After many months, she agreed to let me see her personal collection. It was just objects floor to ceiling in a barnlike structure. I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume. It shook me! I thought I’d seen everything. What she had was a testimony to—this is going to sound weird—not just the creativity of racism, but the diversity in it. I remember that day thinking that I wanted to do what she’d done, but in a different way.
“All these millions, and I mean literally millions, of objects were integral to maintaining Jim Crow.”
MJ: How popular were these collectibles?
DP: They were everyday objects in a lot of people’s homes, including African Americans’. [The antiques collector] had postcards, posters. She had records, 78s. She had ashtrays. She had a racist bell. I think she had the game called Chopped Up Niggers—it’s a puzzle. She told me that she hadn’t paid very much for many of those pieces because at the time people were throwing stuff away. Some people were ashamed.
“Nigger Milk,” a 1916 magazine advertisement that Pilgrim bought in 1988 Courtesy of David Pilgrim/PM Press
MJ: Why own them in the first place?
DP: These toys, games, sheet music about “coons” and “darkies”—all these millions, and I mean literally millions, of objects—were integral to maintaining Jim Crow. Jim Crow could not work without violence, real violence, but also the threat of violence and the depiction of violence. There are a number of games in the museum where you throw things at black people: “hit the nigger” or “hit the Negro” games. If you had such a game, you were actually creating safe spaces to do that.
An early 1900s game that depicted an African American as a target Courtesy of David Pilgrim/PM Press
MJ: Do you also keep track of racist images and memorabilia online?
DP: Absolutely. With the power of the internet and social media, one person can do the damage that in the old days it took many to do. When you have a race-based incident—and I make it my business to look—within one week there are material objects that reflect that incident in a racist way: lunch boxes, posters, puzzles, T-shirts, pillows. President Obama has been an industry for racist objects. He has been portrayed as a witch doctor, a Rastus character from Cream of Wheat, as a Sambo, as an Uncle Tom—and also as gay, as transgender, as communist, as socialist, as a terrorist, as a Muslim. [Many of the] images that appear online are old. The images from the old “coon” songs from the late 1800s and early 1900s show up in memes, and people don’t realize they’re older images.
“President Obama has been an industry for racist objects.”
A 1940s creamer or pitcher from Pilgrim’s collection Courtesy of David Pilgrim/PM Press
1950s fishing lure Courtesy of David Pilgrim/PM Press
MJ: What sort of people collect this stuff?
DP: There are some who want to educate. I’ve met collectors who collect to destroy the pieces. But by far the biggest segment are speculators who know that a McCoy cookie jar was $3 and you can get several hundred dollars for it now.
MJ: Do you see a role for your collection in today’s movement for racial equality?
DP: One of the questions I get often is why we’re still having these conversations. And my answer is: The objects are still being made, they’re still being sold and distributed. There’s not an image in the museum that’s not being reproduced in some way. Secondly, the reason we still have these discussions is because race still matters. But Americans don’t often talk about it in places where their ideas are challenged. We want our museum to be safe but uncomfortable.
MJ: I found myself hiding your book from my kids. At what age do you think it’s okay to expose children to this stuff?
DP: I believe that young people—8, 9, 10—should have discussions appropriate to their age about race. But no one under 12 can come into the museum by themselves, and we discourage parents from bringing them. Right in the center of the room is a lynching tree. Even though it’s contextualized, it can be a house of horrors.
David Pilgrim is a professor, orator, and human rights activist. He is best known as the founder and curator of the Jim Crow Museum—a 10,000-piece collection of racist artifacts located at Ferris State University, which uses objects of intolerance to teach about race, race relations, and racism. He is the author of On Being Black. He lives in Big Rapids, Michigan.
Understanding Jim Crow
Able Greenspan
(Dec. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Understanding Jim Crow
David Pilgrim
PM Press
PO Box 23912, Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
9781629631141, $19.95, 208pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: A proper understanding of race relations in this country must include a solid knowledge of Jim Crow in terms of how it emerged, what it was like, how it ended, and its impact on the culture. "Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice" introduces readers to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a collection of more than 10,000 contemptible collectibles that are used to engage visitors in intense and intelligent discussions about race, race relations, and racism. The items are offensive and they were meant to be offensive. The items in the Jim Crow Museum served to dehumanize Blacks and legitimized patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Using racist objects as teaching tools seems counterintuitive--and, quite frankly, needlessly risky. Many Americans are already apprehensive discussing race relations, especially in settings where their ideas are challenged. The museum and "Understanding Jim Crow" exist to help overcome our collective trepidation and reluctance to talk about race. Fully illustrated, and with context provided by the museum's founder and director David Pilgrim, "Understanding Jim Crow" is both a grisly tour through America's past and an auspicious starting point for racial understanding and healing.
Critique: Profusely illustrated, informed, informative, unique, and an absolute "must" for community and academic library American History and Black History reference collections and supplemental studies lists, "Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice" is also available for personal reading list in a Kindle edition ($7.99).
Greenspan, Able
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greenspan, Able. "Understanding Jim Crow." MBR Bookwatch, Dec. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA439034865&it=r&asid=0621adaa033066c4dc3cb066003334f6. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A439034865
Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice
P. Nicole King
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p199.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice. By David Pilgrim. Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 187. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-62963-114-1.)
David Pilgrim is the author of Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice and the founder and curator of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. The museum is "the nation's largest publicly accessible collection of racist artifacts," which are "used as tools to facilitate a deeper understanding of historical and contemporary patterns and expressions of racism" (p. 172). The book is organized, clear, and engaging, with many high-quality color images from the museum's collection, making it an important and affordable book for teaching the history of racism and aspects of social justice to undergraduate students in many fields.
Pilgrim writes, "I am a garbage collector--racist garbage" (p. 1). The museum's primary goals are to document and provide a safe space for the discussion of the social and historical implications of structural racism in the United States through directly engaging racist material culture. Pilgrim's collections primarily focus on everyday objects--salt and pepper shakers, postcards, matchbooks, and popular culture items--where racism has been made material in quotidian ways.
Both the museum and the book point toward a truth and reconciliation process, as Henry Lewis Gates Jr. states in the foreword, to confront how racism is embedded in the history of this country. The first two chapters of the book are fascinating and original explorations of why Pilgrim came to collect racist objects and how these objects can function as unorthodox teaching tools.
In the second chapter, Pilgrim shares the basic pedagogical premise of the book. First, "you have to reach people where they are," and second, "intellectually beating down someone makes teaching them improbable" (p. 34). Understanding Jim Crow is an example of the importance of public history projects that bring difficult social issues out from the shadows.
Chapter 4 explores the caricatured black family--mammies, Uncle Toms, and pickaninnies. Chapter 5 offers a more detailed investigation of "Flawed Women," and chapter 6 addresses "Dangerous Men" in breaking down different racial stereotypes and addressing issues of gender, class, and region. While these later chapters provide a necessary context for the book, and especially its many images from the museum collection, they break no new scholarly ground.
The final chapter, "A Night in Howell," is a fascinating conclusion that returns to the narrative approach of exposition used in the earlier chapters. The reader is taken to a Ku Klux Klan memorabilia auction in Howell, Michigan--an area known as a historic hotbed of the Klan and white supremacy--where Pilgrim bid on a Klan robe. The Livingston County Diversity Council invited Pilgrim to bid on the Klan robe so it could be used to promote social justice.
The skillful dramatization of the racism Pilgrim experiences in Howell and the attempts by some in the community to overcome the past of white supremacy is a fitting conclusion to a book that speaks to both the hard-fought progress toward justice and how very far we, as a country, still have to go to challenge white supremacy in its many forms.
Pilgrim's book is an important read for publicly engaged scholars. He writes, "I learned that a scholar could be an activist, indeed must be" (pp. 4-5). It is vital for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to engage with Pilgrim's perspective in the same way it is important for visitors to the Jim Crow Museum to engage in an act of envisioning justice. Understanding Jim Crow functions as a traveling exhibition, expanding the reach and audience of the museum. Some of the images in Pilgrim's book are disturbing. However, that is the point.
P. Nicole King
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
King, P. Nicole. "Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 199+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354175&it=r&asid=2476640dc9e58dc6f95eb23a5aca7fb7. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354175
Pilgrim, David. Understanding Jim Crow: using racist memorabilia to teach tolerance and promote social justice
F.W. Gleach
53.10 (June 2016): p1533.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Pilgrim, David. Understanding Jim Crow: using racist memorabilia to teach tolerance and promote social justice. PM Press, 2015. 187p Index ISBN 9781629631141 pbk, $19.95; ISBN 9781629631813 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-4538
E185
2015-930901 MARC
Sociologist Pilgrim (Ferris State Univ.) takes on some of the most potentially offensive objects from US history in order to, as the subtitle indicates, "teach tolerance and promote social justice." Richly illustrated in full color, this is not a book that most people would want to leave lying around for acquaintances to stumble across. The objects, from the collections of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia assembled by Pilgrim at Ferris State University, were produced over the past 150 years to appeal to racist attitudes, and thus depict African Americans in grotesquely stereotypical ways. But Pilgrim's narrative takes these objects and the histories behind them as things to be remembered and learned from. He draws on lived experience and social theory, but whether writing about "Visual Thinking Strategies" (a pedagogical tool), the auction of a Klan robe, the history of Jim Crow, or the stereotypes themselves (like "flawed women" and "dangerous men"), the writing is conversational and straightforward. Pilgrim draws the reader along in considering these difficult objects and histories with as little inflammation as possible. An amazing, wonderful, and important book whose objects and images may offend some readers. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All public and academic levels/libraries.--F. W. Gleach, Cornell University
Gleach, F.W.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gleach, F.W. "Pilgrim, David. Understanding Jim Crow: using racist memorabilia to teach tolerance and promote social justice." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1533. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942949&it=r&asid=4d0a555b80f624359ed46b8272119a45. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942949
Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance
Saturday, January 09, 2016 By Bill Berkowitz, Truthout | Book Review
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Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice, David Pilgrim, PM Press, 2015
The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, located at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, contains thousands of items of despicable racist ephemera - mostly, but not entirely, emanating from the era of Jim Crow - but has as its overarching goal the promotion of racial understanding and the improvement of racial relations. While the museum's displays mostly come from the era of Jim Crow, museum officials emphasize that negative caricatures of Black people did not end with that period. A large display of racist objects produced in the 21st century demonstrates the ways in which Jim Crow-era attitudes and behavior continue to exist.
Each year, thousands of people visit the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)Each year, thousands of people visit the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)
Nevertheless, the majority of the museum's grotesquely racist artifacts date back to the Jim Crow era. They include a 1930s party game called "72 Pictured Party Stunts," which includes a card depicting a dark Black boy with bulging eyes and blood-red lips eating a watermelon as large as he is and instructs players to "go through the motions of a colored boy eating watermelon?" Other racist memorabilia include the "N***** Milk" cartoon, in which a sweet, little Black baby is suckling out of an ink jar, countless mammy renderings on salt and pepper shakers, and postcards of Black people being whipped and hanging from trees.
The racist memorabilia in the museum was all collected over the past three decades by David Pilgrim, an African-American former sociology professor who has devoted his adult life to raising awareness about racism through the museum and its traveling exhibits. In addition to founding the museum, Pilgrim is a filmmaker, who in 2004, produced - with Clayton Rye - the award-winning documentary, Jim Crow's Museum, to explain his approach to battling racism.
Early on in his book, Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice, Pilgrim identifies himself as "a garbage collector," as he has painstakingly, and often emotionally painfully, gathered thousands of items "that portray blacks as coons, Toms, Sambos, mammies, picaninnies, and other dehumanizing racial caricatures." Pilgrim's collection contains "items that defame and belittle Africans and their American descendants."
The Jim Crow Museum is curated to guide visitors through developing a deeper understanding and critique of the many violent ways in which Black people have been caricatured. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)The Jim Crow Museum is curated to guide visitors through developing a deeper understanding and critique of the many violent ways in which Black people have been caricatured. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)
Pilgrim didn't go to garage sales, visit flea markets and later use the internet to buy memorabilia merely to build his personal collection, auction it off or resell it on eBay. Nor was he sitting at home hoarding his collection. And, most of all, he didn't collect scads of repugnant artifacts in order to remove them from plain sight. In fact, Pilgrim believes that "items of intolerance can be used to teach tolerance and promote social justice."
Pilgrim bought his first racist object (a mammy salt shaker, which he immediately smashed) at age 12 or 13 in Mobile, Alabama, the home of his youth. Collecting racist objects eventually turned into the obsession that evolved into Pilgrim's essential project: the founding and curating of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which houses the nation's largest publicly accessible collection of racist artifacts.
If, as a character in Darrin Bell's comic strip "Candorville" put it, "sometimes your outrage muscle needs a rest," then Pilgrim's book on understanding Jim Crow, which presents the message and contents of his museum in book form, might not be for you.
The images displayed in the book certainly are vile and hateful, carefully crafted to elicit the racist ideas that their creators wanted their fellow Americans to perceive, understand and internalize.
Malaak Shabazz, daughter of slain civil rights leader Malcolm X, visits the museum in 2012. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)Malaak Shabazz, daughter of slain civil rights leader Malcolm X, visits the museum in 2012. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)
As Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University professor at Harvard University, points out in the foreword to the book, "Racist imagery essentializing blacks as inferior beings [in Jim Crow's United States] was as exaggerated as it was ubiquitous. The onslaught was constant."
And despite African Americans pulling off "a miracle of human history, of enduring centuries of bondage to claim their freedom," Gates writes, "Jim Crow's propaganda ... was exhausting," and pervasive in the culture. "There was nothing understated about Jim Crow."
Pilgrim's thoughtful and passionately told story makes the book more than just another, albeit unique, history of US racism.
Pilgrim recognizes that "All racial groups have been caricatured in this country, but none has been caricatured as often or in as many ways as have black Americans. Blacks have been portrayed in popular culture as pitiable exotics, cannibalistic savages, hypersexual deviants, childlike buffoons, obedient servants, self-loathing victims, and menaces to society." As Robbin Henderson, former director of the Berkeley Art Center, has said, "Derogatory imagery enables people to absorb stereotypes, which in turn allows them to ignore and condone injustice, discrimination, segregation and racism."
Racist narratives about Black children being “alligator bait” are apparent in this postcard from the 1930s. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)Racist narratives about Black children being "alligator bait" are apparent in this postcard from the 1930s. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)
Understanding Jim Crow contains images of racist book covers, cereal and soapboxes, dishes, endless sets of postcards, greeting cards, records, minstrel joke books and sheet music, and other examples of racist memorabilia. However, it is Pilgrim's thoughtful and passionately told story that makes the book more than just another, albeit unique, history of US racism. Essentially, the book is about Pilgrim's dedication to turning garbage collecting into tools for teaching about racism.
As a graduate student at Ohio State University, Pilgrim started buying items he could afford, paying a couple of bucks for "a postcard that showed a terrified black man being eaten by an alligator," and "for a matchbook that showed a Sambo-like character with oversized genitalia." By the time he joined the sociology faculty at Ferris State University, his collection - still housed at his home - contained more than a thousand items, some of which he brought to public appearances, mainly at local high schools.
A section of the Jim Crow Museum presents the history of representations of the tragic mulatto in the United States. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)A section of the Jim Crow Museum presents the history of representations of the "tragic mulatto" in the United States. (Photo: David Pilgrim/PM Press)
In 1991, Pilgrim managed to see the collection of an elderly Black antique dealer in a small town. After promising not to "pester" her to sell the objects, she closed the shop door, put the "closed sign in the window, and motioned for me to follow," Pilgrim writes.
"If I live to be a hundred," Pilgrim continues in the book, "I will never forget the feeling I had when I saw her collection; it was sadness, a thick, cold sadness. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of objects, side by side, on shelves that reached to the ceiling. All four walls were covered with the most racist objects imaginable." Although Pilgrim already owned some of the items he saw, he was "stunned" by "every conceivable distortion of black people, our people, [that] was on display."
That moment, filled with sadness, disgust, anger and outrage, led Pilgrim to decide to create a museum. And five years after the visit to the elderly Black woman's antique shop, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia opened at Ferris State University.
Understanding Jim Crow is far from being an angry book. But it is disturbing and uncomfortable. It is as James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, wrote in a blurb, a unique effort "to bring out from our dank closets the racial skeletons of our past." However, judging from the numerous racist images that have popped up in all sorts of venues during the years of the Obama presidency, this historical study also hangs onto the present.
Pilgrim describes the museum he created as a place that "use[s] items of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice," by "examining[ing] the historical patterns of race relations and the origins and consequences of racist depictions."
As Pilgrim points out, "The twenty-first century has brought a fear and unwillingness to look at racism in a deep systematic manner." Many Americans prefer to "forget the past and move forward." Nevertheless, in an age of more awareness of police brutality, presidential candidates like Donald Trump stirring up racial animus, "[r]acial stereotypes, sometimes yelled, sometimes whispered, [continue to be] common."
Three years ago, the Jim Crow Museum moved into larger headquarters, which allowed for the integration of stories of "accomplishments of black artists, scholars, scientists, inventors, politicians, military personnel, and athletes who thrived despite living under Jim Crow." A civil rights movement section has also been added.
While cautiously optimistic about the future, Pilgrim refuses to downplay the past or ignore the present. The museum's website has a section called "... and it doesn't stop," which features examples of blatantly racist objects that are still being created.
The United States has never had a truth and reconciliation commission to deal with the country's racial divide. Yet we always seem to be in the midst of some sort of discussion about race, a discussion that frequently gets blown off course, and winds up going nowhere and achieving little. Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls the Jim Crow Museum, a "truth and reconciliation commission, formed out of the detritus of Jim Crow, with an interpretive story encasing it that would help witnesses state down the grotesqueries and, through a shared experience, confront hard truths."
The mission and tagline of the Jim Crow Museum is deceptively simple: "Using Objects of Intolerance to Teach Tolerance." Unfortunately, the production of racist caricatures of Black people did not end with the Jim Crow era. "Blatantly racist objects," like shooting targets depicting Trayvon Martin, were sold in the aftermath of his murder in 2012, Pilgrim points out. There is still much work to be done.
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Bill Berkowitz
Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based freelance writer covering conservative movements. He's a cofounder of the DataCenter, a research library for social and political activists, where he published CultureWatch, a newsletter tracking right-wing movements, and in 2005, he received a Special Journalism Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Email him at: wkbbronx@aol.com.