The Jim Crow Museum and Changing Times

Four years ago a black professor at Michigan’s Ferris State University put together The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia that now contains over 9,000 objects created between the 1870s and the 1960s (with a smattering of Obama hate objects thrown in). The term “Jim Crow” can be defined as a system of laws and customs that only applied to black people to keep society segregated after slavery ended. The culture of Jim Crow was often supported by violence, and the production of demeaning objects, literature and images of the black community was prolific. This museum is attempting to use those “objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice.” The most disgusting object I saw on a recent visit was an 1874 jigsaw puzzle named ‘Chopped Up Niggers’ but others in my Red Hat Society chapter thought a baby bib from the Civil Rights Movement got their vote for the most disgusting object. Its embroidery read, “The only good nigger is a dead nigger.” 

Another sign that caught my attention read, ‘Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here.” My dad used to tell us about a similar sign that was posted at each end of the town where he grew up in Southern Illinois. That sign read, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on Your Black Ass” and for years I thought it was unique to that particular town. It wasn’t. There’s evidence that ‘sunset signs’ were posted in 150 towns, in 31 states during the Jim Crow era and they meant that if you were black and caught outside after dark you could expect to be met with violence. When my dad was a nine-ten year old boy he saw some of that after dark violence when he hid in the woods and watched the Ku Klux Klan burn a cross and hang a man of color.

In the months before my dad died we talked a lot about racism. It was 1999 and Tiger Woods had just won the PGA Championship that year. The ‘good old white boy club’ was finally integrated and Tiger's mark in history as the youngest man and first black man to win the Masters was sealed. Dad, a life-long golfer, was elated and proud to see Tiger’s success---that society could make so much progress in race relations in Dad's lifetime. I bought every magazine with articles about Tiger in them and read them to dad that summer. And Dad would tell me about his experiences with things like: having grown black men step off the sidewalk to let little white boys pass by, having the Klan raid and ransack houses in his Italian neighborhood, and having a sign at the coal mine where my grandfather worked that listed the pay scale by race and color---Italians were paid more than the Irish and the Irish more than the blacks with whites at the top and "black Italians" (Sicilians) at the bottom. One time Dad’s family went to pay their respects when a shopkeeper died and they were shocked to see him laid out in a KKK robe. According to Dad, it was the only time they revealed themselves. We talked about the impact it made on pushing lawmakers when the nightly news showed dogs and fire hoses being used on African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. We talked about how the lily white neighborhood where I grew up in the north was red-lined on a map to prevent people of color from getting mortgages within the red-lines.

My Red Hat chapter spent two-and-half hours at the Jim Crow museum looking at everything from sheet music, Black Sambo and Aunt Jemima figurines, postcards of Klan hangings and beatings, ash trays, black-faced fishing lures, books, records, children’s games to KKK memorabilia and a full-size hanging tree. The professor/curator said if he had his way he wouldn’t have any KKK memorabilia in the museum because he doesn’t want people to get the idea that racism was only practiced by organized groups like the KKK when it was pervasive in the general population during Jim Crow days. One thing I found interesting in the KKK display, though, was the “uniform” of the WKKK---the Women’s Ku Klux Klan. 1) I didn’t know women had their own group and handbook, and 2) their outfits didn’t include a hood as if the Klan didn’t think women were important enough to hide their identity. The curator of this museum is planning and collecting for another museum of hate memorabilia against women as they worked for nearly 100 years to get the right to vote. I hope he gets it finished while I’m still around to see it.

It was an interesting outing with eleven of my Red Hat sisters. It was also noteworthy that the one lady in our group who I had pegged as a racist (based on the e-mails from conspiracy and hate sites she forwards about Obama and “politically correctness”) said several times in the museum that she couldn’t see why certain objects would offend anyone. No one answered her and at one point she said, “I need to keep my mouth shut because I always get myself in trouble with this topic.” Sometimes it's hard for me to rationalize the differences between her online personality with the funny, likeable and bubbly impression she makes in person. She’s got a blind spot which I’m guessing is true of most people who don’t understand that perpetuating negative stereotypes IS racist, who don’t understand that it takes MORE than changing laws to lift the legacy of oppression that still influences the lives of many African Americans. Changing hearts and minds---that will take another generation if not two. Change is messy. Change doesn't move in a straight line. And while true equality is still just an altruistic goal, one day race will no longer matter. Love always wins out over hate in the broad vista views of the human race. ©

 Video about the Jim Crow Museum