Friday at Auction Finds is readers’ questions day. I try to guide readers to resources for them to determine the value of their items. I’m not able to appraise their treasures, but I can do some preliminary research to get them started. So, these are market values, not appraisals for insurance purposes that I suggest for items that have been determined to be of great value.
This week, I am answering one question pertaining to stereotypes in an old Judge magazine, along with some comments from readers about the “Nicodemus” books, which were rife with awful images of black children.
Question:
Hope all is well. I have original pages from Judge Magazine (circa 1880) depicting stereotypes of black people. Example: large lips, bad grammar, etc. etc. Do you buy things like this?
Answer:
Thanks for your email, but I don’t buy these types of images. I find them distasteful.
I don’t buy much Black Americana at all, and when I do I only look for the more positive images. I have bought some books with African American children as characters so I can write about those hateful portrayals.
Judge, though, was a weekly political satire magazine much like its rival Puck magazine, which is better known. It was founded in 1881 by artists who left Puck and it operated until 1947. In its early years, Judge magazine was a supporter of the Republican Party and an ardent attacker of the Democratic Party.
The Philadelphia Print Shop has on its site several illustrations from the magazine, along with this description: “Bound up in the political and social issues considered by staff cartoonists were the issues of race relations, around which regional politics swirled throughout the postbellum period. Here, those themes are considered from a decidedly Northern perspective, though considerable prejudice is still apparent.”
Here’s one of its ugly portrayals from a 1901 cover called “Harvest Number.”
Judge was no different from many other publications from this period and later, especially in books that featured black children as characters. I’ve written about several of them, and have gotten responses from adults who read the “Nicodemus” books as children. The books were written and illustrated by Inez Hogan, who produced more than a dozen from 1932 to 1954 featuring a black boy named Nicodemus and his family. Some people recalled them fondly, including a woman who was searching for copies for her grandchildren.
Some of the storylines in the books were sweet and innocuous, but the black children were hideously drawn, their language distorted and barely decipherable, and their antics foolish. The books were created to perpetuate a culture that deemed black children inferior to the white children for which they were written.
Here are comments from a reader who loved the books as a child:
Comment:
We had Nicodemus books “Nicodemus and his gang” and “Nicodemus and Petunia.” We read and read them. The description, alliteration and stories were compelling. We lived outside of Milwaukee, WI, and had occasional interaction with people of color. When my dad had business I got to go into the neighborhood and play while I waited for him. I always got to play in the street. The books were so enticing for me. I remember wishing I could be part of that neighborhood and gang.
Here are comments from a reader on whom the book left its intended imprint:
Comment:
As a white child in the South and well into high school, the Nicodemus books were on our library shelves and popular. No one perceived that any of it was meant to be malicious. To tell the truth, I don’t see much change in the dialect portrayed in the series and that spoken by inner city Blacks today.
My reply:
After reading your last sentence, I went back to one of the books to read the dialogue and check your observation.
Here’s some of the dialogue I found:
“All God’s chillun got shoes,” said Petunia. “What you talkin’ ’bout”? asked Nicodemus. “Ise talkin’ ’bout a song,” said Petunia.
I don’t know any black person – inner city or otherwise – who uses the word “chillun” and “Ise.”
“Take ’em off,” shouted Nicodemus.
I know a lot of people – black and white – who speak like the statement above.
Your comment also got me to wondering where you’d heard inner city blacks speak. On TV? From your black acquaintances/friends/colleagues who are from the inner city? I really would like to know.
Also, you were a child back then and most children are usually very innocent about such things. The adults and authors of those books knew exactly what they were doing.
I hope you will also read my blog posts about African American authors at the time who were writing children’s books to counter those by Inez Hogan and other white writers like her. Unfortunately, those were probably not in your school library. They would’ve offered you and your classmates some balance and another viewpoint.
Reader’s reply:
I lived in New Orleans for almost 10 years working in sales. I worked all over town and had plenty of exposure to people of all races – and ages – present at the time. This was from ’80 to ’89. New Orleans, as you probably well know, at the time had an almost 67% inner-city Black population (New Orleans was majority white until 1980, when they tipped to majority-minority status and elected their first black mayor, “Dutch” Morial) with the public schools now at over 99%. Whites at schools in N.O. have had to resort to attendance in private schools (those that could afford it) or move their entire families to Jefferson Parish so their children could attend school in Metairie or the Kenner areas.
There were horrific stories aplenty over the years of white children who hung on, trying to survive in the schools of their native New Orleans facing an out-of-control situation, including beatings, shakedowns, and an academic environment that was absolutely unacceptable to education … at the same schools their parents did prior to forced integration in the sixties when everything started to unravel and fall apart.
I listened to more than one of these stories from whites who had to relocate their entire families b/c staying just became too dangerous and oppressive for them and their children. Inner city N.O. now has some of the poorest performing public schools, rivaling only Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis and E. St. Louis etc. I don’t have the room, but you get the idea.
For various reasons, I moved to Shreveport, LA (north LA) where the population was 48% black. The population has recently moved to 51% and has, predictably, elected their first Black mayor. I spent nearly 10 years in Shreveport and had similar experiences, only at a different location. I noticed a slight difference in dialect, so slight it was hardly detectable.
My postscript:
First, I’m not sure if any of the reader’s stats are correct; he didn’t mention where he got them. Also, Ernest Morial was elected mayor in 1977.
Here are some stats from a report scheduled to be published by researchers at Tulane University and included in a recent story on The Atlantic Cities website. The story stated that the public schools in New Orleans, which are 95 percent black, have undergone an amazing turnaround since Katrina, due to some major changes:
The passing rate on state tests is now 60 percent (compared to 35 percent before Katrina), the graduation rate is 75 percent (from 55 percent and above the national average), fewer than one-fifth of children attend failing schools (before, it was three-fifths), and parents are 40 percent more likely to send their children to schools outside their neighborhoods. Also, 80 percent of children in the city attend charter schools, which are issued licenses by the state-run agency that operates the public schools
After reading the man’s comments, I started to listen more closely to the language of white characters on TV reality shows since several of them are based in the South. I watched a few episodes of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” (which is actually funny), based in Louisiana. These folks have their own dialect, and most of the time I can’t understand what the heck the patriarch Phil Robertson is saying. The other night, I came across the History Channel’s “Swamp People,” whose Louisiania dialect was so muddled that the producers offered subtitles, which are normally used for foreign-language movies.
I’m sure my reader wouldn’t generalize about these people as representatives of all people who look or live like them. But he found it so easy to do that when it came to African Americans.
This reader also recounted what he considered the ills of desegregation and life in New Orleans for white parents while ignoring the country’s long and shameful treatment of African Americans. This illustration of a lynching from Judge magazine might prick his memory.
