The Jim Crow Museum, or the "Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia" is an official museum at Ferris State University in Michigan that contains a collection of old, everyday items from the times of segregation (primarily created between the 1870s and 1960s) that have been preserved and put on display. Many of these artifacts were created by racists whites and were usually in the form of drawings, caricatures, and posters/signs.
The main mission of the museum is to teach values such as tolerance and respect through the examples of intolerance and disrespect present in the 10,000+ items in the museum. Through its collection, the museum illustrates how abundant racist ideas and stereotypes were in the Jim Crow era. Items from the Civil Rights Movement are also present in the museum.
This huge museum started out with one person, though. In the 1970s, a man named Dr. David Pilgrim, a former sociology professor who was involved in Ferris State University, began collecting racist items and memorabilia in places such as flea markets across the country. Dr. Pilgrim's collection had increased to more than 2,000 items by 1996, and he decided to donate them to FSU. The collection was used for about 15 years in college classes until 2012, when a new facility was opened as the official "Jim Crow Museum" in one of the FSU buildings.
In today's day and age, the knowledge that people have about racism and segregation during the Jim Crow Era seems to get smaller and smaller, and this museum is there to be a reminder of a piece of history so essential to understanding how society progressed during that time in the past.
3 comments:
It's great how it was used to raise awareness by making use of racist items in a good way. Very insightful
Do you think that this is sort of like keeping up statues of Confederate Leaders in the South or like keeping the Confederate Flag in North Carolina, or is it different because it's showing rather than commemorating?
This museum must have been really powerful when it first opened. Do you know if the people who work in the museum are all black or are they mixed races. Also is Dr. David Pilgrim black or white? Because if he was white then that would make it even more powerful.
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