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• 1 2017-03-21T12:43:12-07:00 Blacks in 19th Century America 4 plain 2017-03-21T12:58:54-07:00

  Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, a popular northern publication, released a series of comics titled "Quashee's Dream of Emancipation" which depicted a slave named Quashee as lazy, dumb and uncivilized in various scenarios. These three qualities were the three most persistent stereotyped attributes of Black Americans in the 19th century.  Among some of the panels Quashee is depicted as a politician or a general, which served to stoke fears about the potential for unqualified ex-slaves to attain political power and status. Others depicted Quashee as lazy and indolent either working less intellectually laborious jobs such as retail, or simply finding great joy in not doing anything at all. Images like these were met with staunch resistance by abolitionists, yet continued to be propagated by proponents of slavery and notable figures such as Thomas Jefferson who had written about the distinct lack of intellect or reason that slaves were capable of. What accompanied these images and many others like them was the tendency to portray blacks as "grotesque". Grotesque Is defined by greatly exaggerating or distorting the physical characteristics of an individual to convey an "otherness" or inhuman quality about the object or person.
  
  Care was taken to depict slaves as ultra-black, with cartoon-ish features. This phenomenon of depicting blacks as "grotesque" helped southerners and pro-slavery advocates see slavery as less morally dubious since Blacks were in fact not "regular people" like white planters. One image depicted "Emancipation Day In South Carolina" with crudely drawn black men with wildly distorted facial features. It was accompanied with a body of text that described the event as "literally jammed with niggers, who grinned and chatted like so many monkeys." Once again the idea of the "Other" makes itself apparent. By equating Blacks to animals like monkeys, it suggests just how unlike they were to white men.
  
  Unfortunately, prospects for black Americans remained limited in a post civil war era. In 1875, the "separate but equal" act reinforced the notion of "otherness" among blacks. Blacks were still perceived as not being on the same level as whites. Beyond the official legal guidelines for black-white interaction, rules of etiquette were actively enforced in southern region and persisted into the 20th century.
  
  Blacks faced blatant discrimination throughout the 1800's but they weren't the only race that suffered under the far reaching and often demoralizing effects of stereotyping.