Greys anatomy has collected every day objects that mark and dehumanize africanamericans. The founder and director of the jim crowe muchl of racism memorabilia he said they can be used as teaching tools. Next on american artifacts a visit to the museum at Ferris State University in big rapids, michigan to see a selection of artifact of a collection of thousands. Special thanks to the museums cinemagrapher recorded the audio and video while we asked questions via zoom. When i was a kid growing up in alabama, 11, 12 years old or so i went to a flea market hybrid carnival. There were carnival rides but also people there selling objects. One of the objects was similar to this. I purchased it and i broke it. And, again, it wasnt a philosophical thing i didnt like the object. I dont remember the second object or third or the fourth, but i started collecting, and basically have been collecting for several decades. Didnt start out with the anticipation of creating a museum. I was what most people would call an obsessive collector, and the idea of it becoming not just a collection for as teaching tools but actually a museum happened much later. So not everybody where you grew up was collecting these items. Theres got to be more, more i mean what was it that made you keep doing it . You know, i dont know. Im thinking ive been thinking about that a lot. You know, my ancestors for four generations back is, you know, there are people from the bahamas, from trinidad, from spain, from Indigenous People of this country. I guess what im saying i grew up as a multiracial, black identified in deep south at a time when jim crowe was it wasnt as strong as it had been, but there was more than residue that was still in effect. So i the thought about race a lot. And then i left there. I between a historically black college my schools, my elementary school, high school were allblack. I lived in a rigidly and definitely a segregated environment. I left there when i went away to college, that was historically black school and i think it was there that i started making the connection between these and the objects just to satisfy some weird interest i had. And instead viewing them as ways to teach about jim crowe and Race Relations in u. S. Before we go through your objects that you selected, you had mentioned jim crowe. The name of your museum but i imagine not everybody really knows the definition, what is jim crowe. Im not sure not everybody does because people come to the museum and quite frankly most people dont know the accurate story of jim crowe. In the late 1820s thomas rice a white, struggling white stage acto blackened his face, adopted the persona of a black i dont know any other way to said but baffoon and started entertaining audiences. He wasnt the first person to dress in blackface and not the first person to dress in blackface and inat tintimate th fools and it wasnt very long before blackface mins the t rirch als took off. He became jim crowe and became a is in minim synonim for ways blacks were portrayed. You might not call this the Jim Crow Museum of racist memorabilia. Not sure what i would call it. But the reason that name seems so appealing at the time was because most of my collection was from, lets say the 1870s to the 1960s. So it was a nice umbrella term for my collection. And the more i studied the collection, the more i under stood that these objects, these every day objects were used to undergird the jim crow racial hi hirearchy in united states. One reason why i would consider change we have objects that are not from the jim crow era and i think it is important that we have objects that have been created in the last five, ten, 15 years because it shows that despite changes in the u. S. We have tastes and attitude indicative of the jim crow mindset. So, could you begin by telling us about southeast objects you have selected for this . I certainly will. I would like to take a couple and then cyndi will share a few. Jim crow museum focus on every day objects. We dont spend a lot of time talking about racist organizations, although you really cant tell the story of Race Relations and racism in the u. S. Without talking about racist groups. But most of our objects are every day objects. So heres one that links both of those because this represents someone who is a member of the kkk, yet its an every day object. I challenge you ill hold these up for you, what do you think the function of these are . Now, obviously, one is a racist function, in other words promoting a white supremacist domestic terrorist group, but where was this used in a home . Maybe on some kind of a lamp, but i dont know. Not a bad answer. These were tree toppers for christmas tree. So that shows you, you know, how the ideas reflected in objects permeated the entire society. And ill tell you one more, this is an example, this doll right here and i dont know if you remember this from i think this was the 2008 election, and this doll sort of plays into the idea that africanamericans are not really humans, that they are more akin to monkeys, apes, and this is a way of saying that then candidate obama was actually a monkey. And i of the ten read poetry from some of the classical people and one of them is walt whitman and youre reading leaves of grass this is so powerful, this says something amazing about the human spirit and then reminded that he referred to black people as, you know, monkeys and baboons. He was not alone in that and. The point is that in this every day object, in this every daikon temporary object we have those ideas morping to the present. Another example of a modern object and theres such an interesting story about this. Years ago i dont name the store and i wont even tell you what it rhymes with, okay. But i went into a store and there were eight cookie jars. And they were all animals. And when you opened the mouth of the dog it barks. And when you opened the mouth of the pig it made pig sounds. But when you open the mouth of the alligator it made this sound. Oh, my sure is tasty cookies. It taps into this long history, especially material culture but in jokes, in movies that black people arent really people. They are actually food for other people, and the story part again this, is an every day again, sitting on the store shelves. Well we do a lot of over the years, weve done a lot of trai trainings or conversations with different groups and some include corporations or corporate leaders. I had in here one day about, i dont know, about six or eight leaders from a company where this was produced. And i told them what this object was, told them that this is sold in your stores, and i played it. They were so horrified that they went out and almost immediately had that removed from the shelves of their stores. So now im feeling all, like the worlds greatest activist, i used education to persuade people to make the world better. But what really happened was these objects then just showed up on the secondary market. They became hot collectibles, and i tell that story because theres no really easy answer to what we the do with objects. My approach has always been items lining this should be destroyed or used as teaching tools. Thats what we do here. We bring people here. We introduce the piece and we ask what is it you see . I want to make sure you gate chance to talk about yes. So as dr. Pilgrim mentioned we focus on every day objects how they perpetuate stereotypes and how they influence peoples attitudes towards africanamerican people. In last few weeks we have seen several Companies Like aunt jemima wanting to rebrand. I have aunt jemima pancake flour mixes. The image has changed over the years. This is one is more highly caricature than others. With aunt jemima people are familiar with the history and we find this happens fairly often in museum as dr. Pilgrim said. People visit this facility not knowing exactly what jim crow was or who jim crow was, and the role that every day objects played. So with aunt jemi mfrp ircjemims based on a mammy caricature. She has detector skin. Unattractive by todays standards. Shes smiling and loyal to the white family. For some people this represents some wholesomeness, some sentimental kind of perspective. For other people it represents the vies tstages of slavery. When we look at jaunt jemima we see every day on store shelves some people do see s rrvistages slavery. Can you tell us about those adversarial boxes of aunt jemima. I would that would be like the first couple of decades of the 1900s. The next one would be more what you would have found in the mid1900s. And then that one which looks my actual aunt would have been the most recent version. The brand aunt jemima started in 1880. It does have a very long history. Related to the mammy caricature, i have this family here of handmade dolls. And this was a recent donation to the museum. It came to us from someone, a grandmother actually handmade these dolls from the 1940s, and i have a little tag here that was included with the set and it says American Family p. M. And i find this one really interesting because this grandmothers interpretation of the American Family in 1941, you can see included a black mammy caricature and shes holding the white baby of the family. So, again, that demonstrates the pervasiveness of this same caricature that aunt jemima was based off of but the spear pervasiveness of black women in society. I want to make sure you talk about the laws. Number one there are fewer people that know about that than the jim crow but yet its making an appearance in the u. S. I was at buehrle park a couple of years ago which is a big huge flea market and there were several tables with very cheap, you know, gollywo govern dolls in them. The gollywog is not a wellknown caricature in united states. But it was one i was familiar with growing up outside of america. It was popular in europe, uk, new zealand, australia. The origins of gollywog came from 1894 where there was a book called the adventures two of little dutch dolls and she included a gollywog character. He has very black skirng bulking white skirngs caricature mouth. Hes dressed, looks very sill lar to the blackface minstrels. In book he was portrayed as being mischiefous, rude, naughty. Gollywog showed up the uk. They used the gollywog image for branding. His head had the same kind of controversies in European Countries as weve had in this country in terms of is this offensive or not . So there are people who are saying its just a doll. Let it go, right . And others are saying, no, look at this. This is a caricature of a caricature, right. And so heres another point we have to make. Its also a slur. Right. So if i would not be pleased if someone called me a golly. I certainly wouldnt be pleased if they called me a wog and i count be pleased if they called me a gollywog. One thing im most pleased from in the museum we get people from other nations who ask us questions and ask us to get involved and for years theres been a fight over, you know, should books that have the gollywog in them be used as childrens books. Should it be removed from the label, should companies that use the gollywog rebrand. Conversations that are very similar to the ones that we have in u. S. About some of our products. So, like with aunt jemjemima, b the way i was stunned. When quaker announced that they were rebranding aunt jemimi i was absolutely stunned. Because weve had conversations for years and, again, even though mostly were facilators we have world view and part of my world view its racist even though i might not say that to the visitor who comes in but getting the home have conversations so that they also hear that. And it just did not seem likely that, that was ever going to change. And then when they announced that change, other Companies Began to change. But the point im trying to make in my own meandering way is that aunt jemima products like that, most of the products like that in u. S. That got dealt with in 1940s. The 1950s. The 1960s. So kids were not still reading little black sambo in schools as a textbook and some other branding had already changed. These held on. The Company Refused for years and years. So im very pleased that those changes are occurring. I suppose im even more pleased with the conversations that are going along with those changes. So im not going to get into a big discussion about peoples motives and for our purposes it represents it sounds so weird to say but a kind of validation, if not vindication for the work that weve been doing for many years. Can i ask you a question. What i hear quite often because it was created outside of the united states, although people arent aware of American History, therefore, they see that disconnect as validation that they should still exist and still should be made. What would your response be . Well, so one of my responses would be even if you did not know the history, just the aesthetics of the object itself. So when i was like say burly park and i saw this one table and it was all he wasnt selling a lot of times at flea markets people have 50 things to sell. This person had one product and they were these gollywog dolls in plastic bags selling for, you know, five bucks. He had that table with hundreds of them. Many are handmade. These were not. These were massproduced. So my point is that even so the person walking down the ailes, it doesnt matter in some sense that they dont know the history. It would be good if they did but it doesnt matter because what they are seeing is a table of grotesquely caricature, black dolls so thats the one piece. The other piece is i mean its really the responsibility of educators to educate and part of the challenge is, is that a lot of the historians in this country, a lot of the sociologists dont know the history of these objects. So, you know, were not robots and im certainly not a robot. I mean i have you know, ive struggled collecting these things at points. Ive only lost my balance maybe a handful of times. But one of those times it was in early 1980s, i was in laporte, indiana and i went into an antique mall, and it was a small antique mall but there were lots of booths. And one of them had this print. And i dont know, you can do the math on my age, i was obviously much younger, and not asthma turin some ways, i guess. So i saw this. Now, we have pieces that are much worse than this in terms of the harshness of the caricature. And the socalled nword, we have a whole section on that. And so its not like these things are new to me. But on that particular day, when i walked up to the i walked up to the i think it was framed. It was either 20 or 22 and its an ad from like the early 1900s. And the clerk wrote down black print. On my receipt. But i wanted her to write down the caption. Which says nigger man. If you sell stuff like this write down what is it. Again i havent lost my balance. Collecting these objects, teaching about these objects, you know, its not always easy. And i left. Years later i reflected on that. And i felt bad about it because the person working there, they didnt own the antique mall. This was just someone working there, right. And i was holding that person responsible for the object in a very specific way, and i actually thought, you know, i owe them an apology. And against all odds, i thought well, you know, if i ever go back there, against the odds the person will still thereabout and ill have a conversation and say, listen, its hard to collect this stuff. Im not trying to be melodra melodramat melodramatic. The mall was closed. Theres no big ending on that. I wanted to make sure i talked about that. I would agree with it being difficult to use an object as a teaching tool because to me as an effective facilitator we have to distance ourselves emotionally. Sometimes thats hard to reconcile. Being surrounded by these objects every single day and having to help people and guide people through their experience with these objects, its a challenging aspect. Well, i dont know if you have to do this but i have to remind myself that this is someones first time in here. Yes. And this is like, you know, a particular object ive dealt with the object a thousand of times and its new to them. We used to have several instructors who helped us as volunteer docents. One of the Biggest Challenges for them was not to crush people, because someone if you create a space where people are free and safe, they can be uncomfortable but still safe. So if you create a space where people are safe to have discussions then they will say some things that quite frankly, you know, actually are offensive to us, right. They are offensive because they represent kind of an ignorance of the past. Or they reflect, you know, a world view thats, you know, not democratic, not fair minded and whatever else you want to say. Right. So the big challenge for them was, you know, someone said something that they didnt like or reflected, again, ignorance or misunderstanding of the past and they would need to like make that person know. You cant work in this space if thats who you are. One challenge i find too is that some people have gone their whole lives believing whether its being taught or taught by family members or just an experience in the world and suddenly they are thrust into this space where they are confronting their entire life in many ways, and that can be confronting for people and some people are very willing to take on a new perspective and learn. Others are not. But it can be a challenging space. Like for us facilitators or docents. I want to talk about this one. My supervisor, as a sociology professor he was the department head. As much as that can be a sue r per supervisory position. We were friends. He and i went to a conference, National Conference ever race and ethnicity. And this was in new orleans. I think in i think in early or mid90s. We gave a session on the Jim Crow Museum introducing the mission, vision and the work of the museum to what was a large and mostly africanamerican audience. And when we got to the questions, you know, the end. We offered people an opportunity to engage us with questions, but also to give us their, you know, their views or their beliefs. And it was it was eyeopening. Because they said, listen, we understand that the u. S. Doesnt have a racist museum and that youre creating, that this will not be a black history museum, this will not be an africanamerican achievement museum, those things are needed and valuable but we understand that thats not what youre going to do. However, if youre going to have a museum that has a lynching tree in it, that has these every day caricatures, objects in it, you have to have a space in there showing how africanamericans pushed back. You have to. And so its not enough to just say were not a black history museum. Someone else is telling that part of the story. You have to also tell that part of the story and it just cant be a nod. You have to really tell that story. And it really