Pitcher, 1840-60
England
Soft paste porcelain
Lent by Rex Stark
Some abolitionist propaganda, despite its anti-slavery message, relied on
imagery that was unmistakably racist. The "Jim Crow" image seen
on this pitcher originated during the 1830s, when a white performer named
Thomas Rice began portraying a southern slave in blackface. As the scholar
W. T. Lhamon has recently shown, this character was originally meant as satire—a
trickster figure who sang surprisingly confrontational lyrics such as "An'
I caution all de white dandies not to come in my way, for as sure as they
insult me, dey 'll in de gutter lay." Yet Rice’s "Jim Crow"
act, like other blackface "minstrel" performances at the time, played
on and reinforced racist stereotypes of African-Americans as lazy, childlike,
and deceitful. After the Civil War the term "Jim Crow" was applied
to expressly racist laws in the south that established official segregation
or prevented blacks from voting. The caricature that Rice helped to invent
persisted well into the twentieth-century in vaudeville performance, film,
and radio—and, arguably, into American popular culture of the present
day.
