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Popular American folklore, both during and after the period of legal chattel slavery in the United States, frequently used the imagery of black children or infants being used as bait for alligators. There is no meaningful evidence that black children were ever used in this way, but the motif is present in a wide array of media – including newspaper reports, songs, sheet music, and visual art. In contemporary American slang, alligator bait is a racial slur, and the purported practice remains in the cultural consciousness.

Origins

The reasons for first identifying black babies as alligator bait are unknown, but the identification may be a consequence of earlier associations of African crocodiles – a relative of American alligators – with Africa and its people. American alligators largely live in the swamplands of the South, which were one place people escaping enslavement hid to evade capture. According to popular legend, enslaved people who disappeared in swamps may have been killed by alligators; children were understood as particularly vulnerable to attacks by alligators, and that identification may have evolved into the bait image.

The image is a subtype of the racist pickaninny caricature and stereotype of black children, where they were represented as almost unhuman, filthy, and unlovable.

Popular imagination

In the American popular imagination, both during and after legal slavery, black children were commonly used as bait for alligators, the apex predator of American folklore. Drawings of black babies luring alligators were printed by companies like Underwood & Underwood on postcards, cigar boxes, sheet music covers, and in paintings. Several stories were printed in American newspapers about the alleged practice. Due to the popularity of the idea, letter openers were manufactured in designs resembling alligators, some of which came equipped with small replicas of black children's heads to be placed in the alligator's mouth. The sheet music drawings were almost purely symbolic; the images of black children being hunted by alligators were not represented in almost any corresponding music, though some songs (without the iconography) did have alligator bait as a component. In general, the drawings reinforced the racist belief that black people were victims to nature and that their race made it reasonable to assume they should die terribly.

The concept of children luring predators separately existed during the period of British rule over Sri Lanka; Sri Lankan children were said to have been used as bait for crocodiles, and several newspapers published stories and drawings of the purported practice.

Historical accuracy and contemporary culture

In May 2013, Franklin Hughes of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia argued that due to the number of periodicals which mention the use of black children as bait for alligators, it likely occurred, though it was not widespread or became a normal practice. Four years later, Hughes argued again that it likely occurred, though he also found an article from Time magazine, contemporaneous to one alleged incident printed in newspapers, which denied that the practice ever occurred and that the report was a "silly lie, false and absurd".

A Snopes article from 2017 was unable to find any meaningful evidence that the practice occurred; Patricia Turner, a historian on black folklore and the alligator bait cultural phenomenon, told Snopes it likelier never did. The Snopes writer said it was impossible to prove a negative claim, and that no proponents of the historicity of the practice have met their burden of proof by providing any evidence of the practice.

In 1920, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia shared a letter from a researcher sharing his research into the "alligator bait" phenomenon. He found that the author of the earliest-known description of alligator or crocodile hunting using live-human bait (published in 1888, about supposed hunting practices by British hunters in Ceylon) had been written by a military-humor cartoonist. He also found that the author of one of the articles frequently cited as "evidence" of the historical truth of the practice (published in 1923, related to alligator hunting in Chipley, Florida) had been written by a man better known as a "sex philosopher." The letter shared a link to an article surveying dozens of similar stories. The earliest such story suggesting similar alligator hunting practices in the United States related to using "a nice, fat baby" rented from a (presumably white) "cracker mother to whom a half dollar is ample recompense for the risk that her child is to run." The detail about renting the babies from their parents for a small fee is a common theme in most of the crocodile/alligator bait stories, beginning with the original one out of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) through the one from Chipley, Florida.

In American slang, alligator bait (or 'gator bait) is a chiefly Southern slur aimed at black people, particularly children, though it also has currency in the North; the term implies that the target is worthless and expendable. The image of black children being put in peril to lure alligators remains in popular culture. In 2020, the University of Florida ended the "Gator Bait" chant during athletic events; university historian Carl Van Ness said the chant likely started after the 1950s, and though it may not have originated from the racial slur, the two were connected.

References

Citations

1. ^ Dean 2000, p. 33.
2. Fulton 2006, pp. 127–128.
3. Dean 2000, p. 22.
4. Finley 2019, p. 18.
5. ""Alligator Bait"". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. 24: 22. 1999.
6. Dean 2000, pp. 22–23.
7. Tuck 2009, p. 417.
8. ^ Hughes 2013.
9. Dean 2000, p. 23.
10. Dubin, Steven C. (1987). "Symbolic Slavery: Black Representations in Popular Culture". Social Problems. 34 (2): 122–140.
11. Pearson 2021, pp. 32–33.
12. Cox 2010, p. 207.
13. Hatfield, Philip J. (2018). "A collection of people: migration, settlement and frontiers". Canada in the Frame: Copyright, Collections and the Image of Canada, 1895-1924. UCL Press. pp. 106–132.
14. de Silva & Somaweera 2015, p. 6806.
15. Hughes 2017.
16. ^ Emery 2017.
17. Reitan, Peter. "2020-Letter to the Jim Crow Museum". Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Retrieved 3 December 2022.
18. Jensen-Brown, Peter. "Live Human Alligator Bait - Fact or Fiction". Early Sports 'n' Pop-Culture History Blog. Retrieved 3 December 2022.
19. "The Topeka State Journal". September 29, 1899.
20. Herbst 1997, p. 8.
21. Hinton 2009, pp. 101, 103.
22. Van Ness 2020.

Bibliography

• Cox, Nicole C. (2010). "Selling seduction: Women and feminine nature in 1920s Florida advertising". Florida Historical Quarterly. 89 (2): 186–209.
• Dean, Carolyn (2000). "Boys and girls and 'boys': Popular depictions of African-American children and childlike adults in the United States, 1850–1930". Journal of American and Comparative Cultures. 23 (3): 17–35. doi:10.1111/j.1537-4726.2000.2303_17.x.
• Finley, Cheryl (2019). "Photography and the archive". Critical Arts. 33 (6): 8–23. doi:10.1080/02560046.2019.1695868.
• Emery, David (June 9, 2017). "Were black children used as alligator bait in the American South?". Snopes. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
• Fulton, DoVeanna S. (2006). Speaking power: Black feminist orality in women's narratives of slavery. State University of New York Press.
• Herbst, Philip H. (1997). "Alligator bait". The color of words: An encyclopedic dictionary of ethnic bias in the United States. Intercultural Press. p. 8.
• Hinton, KaaVonia (2009). Sharon M. Draper: Embracing literacy. Scarecrow Press.
• Hughes, Franklin (May 2013). "Alligator bait". Jim Crow Museum. Ferris State University. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
• Hughes, Franklin (June 2017). "Alligator bait revisited". Jim Crow Museum. Ferris State University. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
• Pearson, Erin (2021). "Consuming monsters: Hungry animals in the discourse on slavery". Arizona Quarterly. 77 (2): 25–53. doi:10.1353/arq.2021.0009.
• de Silva, Anslem; Somaweera, Ruchira (26 January 2015). "Were human babies used as bait in crocodile hunts in colonial Sri Lanka?". Journal of Threatened Taxa. 7 (1): 6805–6809. doi:10.11609/jott.o4161.6805-9.
• Tuck, Eve (2009). "Suspending damage: A letter to communities". Harvard Educational Review. 79 (3): 409–428. doi:10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15.
• Van Ness, Carl (June 27, 2020). "Here's what UF's historian says about the 'Gator Bait' history and controversy". Opinion. Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved September 2, 2022.

• African-American cultural history
• Slavery in the United States
• Stereotypes of African Americans