Home > Blogs > Post Content
 |
Sister Helen, I've first heard about this in an article from a newspaper called "The Afro-American Ledger" newspaper. Not only was this practiced in Florida, but also in Louisiana, Mississippi, and some parts of Alabama.
Upon further research, I found the practice of using babies as alligator bait originated in the 1600's in the Republic of Suriname. The Republic of Suriname is a small country on the northeastern coast of South America. The Jewish people of Suriname were slave owners, and sometimes, if the enslaved mother had children and she did something they considered wrong, the slavemaster would grab her baby/child and they would gather all of their other enslaved workers and proceed to cut off all the fingers and toes (one by one) of the little baby in front of the mother. Sometimes they would cut off the baby's arms or legs (or both), and the baby would be screaming for its mother while the mother was held in shackles. The child would grow up mutilated. They thought by making an example of the baby/child nobody else would "overstep their boundaries." The practice later made its way to the United States through international intervention and foreign policy.
Friday, February 5th 2016 at 6:27PM
Siebra Muhammad
|
|
|
In 1923 Time magazine carried this story:
From Chipley, Fla., it was reported that colored babies were being used for alligator bait. The infants are allowed to play in shallow water while expert riflemen watch from concealment nearby. When a saurian approaches his prey, he is shot by the rifleme.
Alligator bait, also known as gator bait, is the practice of using little black children as bait to catch alligators.
Here is the most complete account of how it was done, coming from the grandson of someone who says he used to do it:
… the slaves who had babies they would steal the babies during the course of the day, some times when their mothers weren’t watching . … some would be infants, some would be a year old, he said some would be toddlers, he said they would grab these children and take them down to the swamp, and leave them in pens like little chicken coops.
They would go down there at night, take these babies and …. tie them up, put a rope around their neck and around their torso, around here, and tie it tight.
… they’d be screaming. … what they were doing would help them to chum the water. He said when they would throw the babies in tied to this rope, he said in a matter of minutes, he said, the alligator were on them. He said the alligator would clamp his jaws on that child, as a matter of fact once he clamped on them he was really swallowed, he said you couldn’t see anything but the rope!
As a lifelong student, and later lecturer of African and African American history, I thought I had covered just about all of the bases when it came to atrocities committed against black people by Europeans and their American cousins.
I've done the research, written the papers, attended the classes and seminars...and I travel every year to the Motherland.
I have thoroughly explored the Atlantic Slave Trade, beginning with the kidnapping of Africans from the interior of Africa. I have been force-marched along with my forebearers through the thick jungle and bush, across mile-wide rivers, and burning deserts to the coast, sometimes for hundreds of miles.
I have actually visited many of the “slave castles” – dungeons – which dot Africa's West Coast and where the captured men, women and children were warehoused like so much cattle or cord wood (chattel) until an English, French, Dutch, Spanish or American slave ship appeared on the horizon to transport them to a new life of endless unpaid, forced labor in the so-called “New World.”
And, of course, as stated, I've done the reading, watched the movies and documentaries, about the absolutely indescribable horror of the damnable voyage across the Atlantic that has come down to us as “The Middle Passage.” Indeed, on every single flight I've made back and forth across that vast and angry ocean, I look down from 35,000 feet at its turbulent waters. I try, but of course can never really imagine, appreciate or understand what it must have been like for those many millions who were hog-tied naked, chained and shackled in those filthy ships' holds.
And then there is the actual on-the-ground, in-the-field, in-the-mine, and in-the-house enslavement of the people. Again, I've read the books.
But I also talked extensively with my own now deceased parents and grandparents (on both sides) about their “treatment” from the 1920s right straight through to the 1960s in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas. They were never slaves per se, but they might as well have been. My father's parents – and him – were share croppers and tenant farmers until they escaped Louisiana during World War II.
What you will read below and watch is breathtaking in its depravity.
I called my mother's last surviving sister tonight and asked her did she know anything about this. She is 83. And, if she did, why we were never told of this as kids growing up. She hesitated for a full minute. Finally, they did not tell us about "a lot of things that white folks did to us" "down South," she said. They were afraid that it would forever embitter me, my siblings and cousins against white people forever. Once they had all successfully escaped the South, they wanted to put those years behind them, and build new lives here "up North," she concluded.
And so it is that I am thankful that the Internet has provided an opportunity for black people to regain their stolen history – not just as victims of white America but as the descendants of powerful empires and nation-states which once put Europe to shame in terms of wealth, land, population, health, education, and most importantly, in terms of justice.
Did you know that black babies were often used as bait for alligators in the swamps from Texas to Florida. I didn't until today. It just never occurred to me that any people would do – could do – such a thing to another people.
But it happened – for hundreds of years, well into the 20th century.
The practice has been documented in at least three movies: “Alligator Bait” (1900) and “The ‘Gator and the Pickaninny” (1900). And the story of two black boys who served as alligator bait was told in “Untamed Fury” (1947).
Indeed, the term “alligator bait” was common throughout the South from at least the 1860s to and through the 1960s. It was a racial slur and threat among whites that was meant to “domesticate” recalcitrant black children. But by the 1940s in Harlem, New York, “alligator bait” applied to blacks of any age – particularly those who were from Florida.
Finally, in terms of iconography, from at least the 1890s to the 1960s, black children were often pictured as alligator bait – as toys for white children, soap dishes, toothbrushes, ash trays, and especially on postcards sent through the US mail.
Again, the attached video is disturbing. I strongly advise anyone with a weak stomach not to view it.
Reparations anyone? Naw ... didn't think so.
White folks don't owe black folks anything, right?
Just like they don't owe the Indians a damn thing, either – except maybe a few casinos.
References
http://www.authentichistory.com/dive...*/7...
http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...lig...
http://www.authentichistory.com/dive...*/7...
Friday, February 5th 2016 at 6:30PM
Siebra Muhammad
|
Blogs Home
|
|
|
