The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

watching down on us

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 blacks 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.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia is exactly what it sounds like: it is a collection of many hundreds of thousands of racist items collected over the years by one man—one very angry man, who wishes to use his anger and hatred towards these objects to teach the visitors of the museum about what Jim Crow really was, and, believe it or not, what it still is.

The official website for the museum is located here

. If you happen to live near the Ferris State University, I urge you to go see it with your own eyes. (Although it looks like the museum is closed for this term because it's being moved into a bigger facility!) If you don't, like myself, this website has a great collection of articles written by David Pilgrim, the collector, on the many racist caricatures, Jim Crow, the word "nigger", and so on.

Why does the museum exist?

Well, besides the fact that Pilgrim needed to find some place to store all that crap that wasn't his own house:

I have a goal to create a room that when people come into that room, it changes the way they talk about race. — Dr. David Pilgrim, Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, Ferris State University; Curator, Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.

For starters, I truly recommend reading Why I Collect Racist Objects

Due to the other thread about the Tom caricature being brought up, I thought I'd share.

edited 17th Oct '11 6:45:21 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.