Showing respect to "A Memphis Blue" & "a fightin' coon."

I almost hate my first ever blog post being about a subject like this, but if you know me at all, you know I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am committed to posting once a week for an entire year as we strip and sell this material; as I do this I hope to find interesting and funny things to share with you (certainly the "German Madame is Vampire Spy"  story looked like a candidate) but the thing that struck me most this week was from 1918 edition of a Cleveland Ohio paper called The Sunday Leader. It was on the front page of it's section "Weekly Magazine of the War." The main text on the page reads: "A Leader Artist Puts a Grin On the Grim Visage of War." There wasn't a lot of color ink in the paper back then, so a full color page of sketches really stands out while looking through them. I'll have to admit, when I first saw this I thought it was nice "black Americana" and would sell easily for a decent price. Later yesterday evening I was flipping through to find it when I noticed what was written beneath the photos of the two black soldiers. At first I kind of laughed uncomfortably to myself about how ridiculous it seemed that someone would put that under the sketches. Then it dawned on me that these were AMERICAN SOLDIERS fighting for their country and it wasn't some far away editor or typewriter jockey that captioned that drawing, it was the american artist in France who was amongst them. My reaction turned visceral almost immediately. Sure I'd heard about things like this but this was a lot different than hearing some historian or great-great granddaughter of a slave on tv talking about mistreatments and attitudes of whites toward blacks during this period of American history; this was like seeing it first hand. This was an actual paper, from the north (where we are often led to believe they were somehow so nice and enlightened on this subject), that was in a PUBLIC LIBRARY! Children would probably flip to this first since there wasn't a comic section yet!

To be clear, I'm not upset that white people looked at black people like this; I'm upset that any person would look at any other person like this. I think something like this needs to be preserved, seen, and discussed. The danger after seeing something of this nature is to see this as just a "black/white" issue and/or an issue in our past. Truth is we look down on people all the time, individually and as groups. Southern people with a heavy accent are stereotyped as comedy much like these black men were then. Mexican descendent's, legal Americans or not, are treated as serfs (it's fine for you to cut my grass for cheap or cook my food but I don't want to see your children at school/church/hanging out with mine). People who are either from or descended of parents from the Pakistan/India area are looked at as terrorists, and often scrutinized/ostracized simply because of the way they look. Treating these issues as separate, or different than one another, is ignorant and prejudiced in itself.


The heart of the issue is seeing people as less than people. All the signs are here of the same hate that spawns wars and genocides. It starts by calling them animal names (Jewish people were referred to as rats in Nazi propaganda films), and drawing them to resemble an animal more than a person. The last part is really the most insidious, make it seem as though they are ok with it: "I'se one of them fightin' coons from South Chicago, I is." No Sir; you were a soldier, a brother, a son, and a friend to someone and that's how I'll choose to remember you... as a man.  

I have decided to stick with love. 

Hate is too great a burden to bear. 

-Martin Luther King Jr.