Jim Crow Museum: Hateful Things

Ferris State University in Michigan hosts a “Jim Crow Museum” of racist memorabilia.

There are samples from a traveling portion of the museum here and here and there is a YouTube video here.

There is also a companion traveling collection called “Them: Images of Separation,” which

… explores the subjugation of women, poor Whites, gays, Jewish Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans — and others. As Dr. King stated, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

You can view samples from “Them” here.

Although we would like to dream of a day where pornographic and racist images exist only as curiosities in museums, as remnants and reminders of the “bad old days,” as you can see from these exhibitions and the other items in this blog, that day is not yet with us.

Dr. David Pilgrim is the Curator of the Jim Crow museum and the traveling exhibits. You can read some of his articles and a collection of questions to which he and other scholars have written responses.