There was a fascinating article in yesterday's N.Y. Times about a shop in Harlem that sells racist collectibles and memorabilia. Aunt Meriam's, on West 125th Street, is owned and operated by mother and daughter team of Mary (above) and Glenda Taylor.
While the shop sells all manner of black memorabilia, including advertisements for the Cotton Club and playbills for a Broadway musical starring Sammy Davis Jr., the Taylors and dealers like them also sell "collectibles from the Jim Crow era -- cookie jars, coin banks, matchbook covers, fruit-box labels, ashtrays, postcards, sheet music, just to name a few items -- that portray blacks in grotesquely racist ways. Little boys eat watermelon. Men steal chickens. Women happily scrub and clean."
What I found interesting is that the majority of the people in the market for these type of collectibles are black. "Why do some Jews collect Holocaust material?" asked Wyatt Houston Day of the Swann Galleries in Manhattan, who organizes an annual auction of African-Americana. "Any people who endure a Holocaust tend to collect, out of a lest-we-forget impulse. It is very much akin to what happened to blacks, and the objects are just as vile."
The article also says there's a temporary Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, which is in the process of raising money for a permanent location of what is truly a shocking collection of disturbing items, like some of the ones pictured here.
1 comment:
Let's just hope one day people get as appalled at the sight of anti-gay memorabilia. Frankly, I'm tired of not seeing the outrage.
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