Understanding Jim Crow

Understanding Jim Crow

In his book, David Pilgrim discusses how his habit of collecting racist memorabilia has turned into something much more.

With his collection, Pilgrim helped establish a museum exhibit on the era of Jim Crow through paraphernalia from the age. Initially, Pilgrim refers to his hobby as collecting “racist garbage”, a hobby that he began as a teenager. As someone who is partially African American himself, he felt inclined toward these objects even though they made him feel uncomfortable enough that he was happy to eventually part with them and donate them to the museum. He acknowledges that it was an unusual feeling for a collector to have about his collection.

 When Pilgrim was starting his collection, acquiring these items was a lot easier to do than it would have been for someone today. Perhaps a reflection of the changing times? Or hopefully Americans are becoming more embarrassed by our history of “Mammy” salt and pepper shakers and cartoons of black children eating over-sized watermelons.

 In the first section of the book, Pilgrim tells us about his personal background and why he had the collection, what it meant to him and how he came to establish the exhibit at the university at which he worked. He notes that his teachers and professors have never failed to mention the achievements of men like Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. DuBois so it wasn’t as if African Americans had been completely passed by in history class; but he raises the question of why he never heard any of his professors discuss the average African American. Pilgrim also acknowledges that most Americans know that slavery was not good and that it happened and now it’s over and that the civil rights of movement of the 1960’s took place and it happened and now it’s over.  What doesn’t even seem to get acknowledged is the traumatic era in our history known as “Jim Crow” which took place in the hundred years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. So if it’s not being discussed in our schools, how can we make it available to students and their parents and encourage people to have an open discussion about this dark period in our history where blacks were being kept from expressing their constitutional rights and being murdered in large numbers. That’s where Pilgrim’s racist collection comes in.

Pilgrim expresses that the purpose of his exhibit is to “continue the journey towards understanding and improving race relations,” despite the fact that many people are unwilling or even afraid to take a good long hard look at our racist past (and present due to the fact that Pilgrim is constantly updating his exhibits with memorabilia surrounding the Trayvon Martin case and the 2008 election of Barack Obama).  Pilgrim is essentially a scholar was has become an activist in his attempt to encourage average Americans to discuss race and prejudice towards African Americans. There is something inherently different about reading the statistics on lynchings in the South and staring at a photograph of a white man standing beside a black body; or how the white man’s view of African Americans was created not from personal experience but from cartoons and depictions that they saw of blacks in movies like Gone with the Wind or Aunt Jemima or even whites portraying oafish blacks in minstrel shows by painting their skin with pitch black grease paint. How could any white person take blacks seriously when all they knew of them was Mammy and the lazy black “coon” being portrayed in the minstrel shows around the country? Exhibits like Pilgrim's force people to come face to face with pas they may not have even known existed. It’s a lot easier to ignore text that it is to ignore the hood of a member of the KKK staring at you in the face or a recreation of an auction block used to sell slaves and destroy families.

I believe that the biggest difficulties for exhibits like this and the new museum on African American history and culture opening as part of the Smithsonian later this month is getting a non-black clientele to come and experience what the exhibits have to offer. In regards to the Smithsonian,  it was built for all Americans to come in and experience African American history as a core part of American history; however, as Pilgrims mentions several times in his book it is difficult to get people to want to talk about or acknowledge their roles or the roles of their ancestors in these atrocities. People are more willing to go and visit the National Holocaust museum because they can distance themselves from the perpetrators of those atrocities and say how terrible the Germans behaved while also turning a blind of the United States’ treatment of both Japanese and African Americans in their own country during the same period.

Hopefully more and more of these exhibits will appear across the country as we try to become more comfortable with talking about our own issues with race and we will be able to confront a replica of an auction block in the Smithsonian or racist “trash” in the Jim Crow Museum the same way we and have an open discussion about it and feel comfortable with addressing ours sins and educating ourselves and other generations about the darker parts in our history.

Questions to consider:

1.       How can memorabilia be interpreted as truth?

2.       Can racist memorabilia effective serve a non-racist purpose?

3.       Can relics from the past help us discuss the issues of today?