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The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI uses racist objects to teach tolerance.
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Every minority group in the country has been caricature
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There have been two and three dimensional objects which mock and defame them
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But no group has been caricature as often or in as many ways as African Americans
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People come into the museum and they're really surprised to see authentic pieces
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I think two of the best teaching tools are stories and and authentic objects
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And when you can combine those, I think you can pierce what is often a shield
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that people use against learning about something. My name is David Pilgrim
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I am vice president for diversity, inclusion, and strategic initiatives at Fair State University
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I'm also the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum. The Jim Crow Museum
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The museum is the nation's largest publicly accessible collection of racist objects
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We are an anti-racism facility that uses objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote
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social justice. Most people that come into the museum don't know what Jim Crow is
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It's really the whole system, the racial hierarchy that had whites at the top and blacks
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at the bottom. and the objects that we have in the museum are the evidence of that hierarchy
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I believe there's a power in the actual objects. You can show a photograph of a segregation sign
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but it's more powerful to show the segregation sign. It kind of weird but I been much of my childhood and early adulthood traveling to you know flea markets and auction houses and people homes looking for these objects I grew up in Alabama Mobile
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and Pritch of Alabama at the end of the Jim Crow period. I was always fascinated with race
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and bought my first piece when I was 11 or 12. But in those days
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these objects were everywhere, including in the homes of African Americans. I had a small and growing collection, went to a historically black college, Jarvis Christian
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College, which is in Hawkins, Texas. And it was there that I understood from my teachers that you could use objects to teach
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And so these became teaching tools for me. And I didn't have the expectation that I would create a museum
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quite frankly I didn't know what I would do with my collection
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I taught American minorities and race relations and so I would use the objects as teaching tools but
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my collection was growing and I thought well I need a physical location to be and so they gave me this tiny room
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that was only 500 square feet and you know I would bring my students in there
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instead of me bringing an object to class every day. And eventually, other teachers started bringing their students in there
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and it took another more than a decade to move into a museum proper
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which we did in 2012. The collection that I donated to the institution
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which served as sort of the founding or base collection, was probably about you know something just over 3 pieces Our focus is really on everyday objects that you would have found in someone home
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Objects that mocked in the little African Americans, objects like cookie jars and toys and games and sheep music
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any everyday object think of. The museum, by the way, also has objects that show African-American
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pushing back. And so we have pieces from artists, African American artists who deconstruct
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racist imagery. We have a small civil life section. We also have a section of African American
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achievement because African Americans were not simply victims of Jim Crow, but did push back
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and eventually were central to dismantling Jim Crow in this country. We have a lynching tree because over 4,000 African Americans were lynched during the Jim Crow period
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We have a showcase which deals with the clan. One of the sections in the museum where we have our best discussions is a recreated kitchen where you have Aunt Yamama and other
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commercialized manny images. I think we have great conversations there because some people look at that and they think
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there's nothing wrong with this. This is not offensive. It certainly doesn't offend me. It's actually in a nostalgic way
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very pleasant because it makes me think of good time spent with my family. But others like myself
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see it as the remnants and the residue of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation
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You know struck me a while back in this in the museum by myself standing in front of a litching tree and all these horrible caricatured objects that the museum is really a testimony to the resiliency of African people
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The Jim Quote period itself went from the 1870s to the 1960s, but we didn't limit the collection
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to that, and I'm glad we didn't. I'm glad, for example, that we have some particular objects, because they show that
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the attitudes, taste, and values of the Jim Crow period morphed into the present
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sometime. We've always had racial justice movements. This most recent deration, sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd and others, has caused all Americans
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not just corporations and police departments, but all of us to ask ourselves the question
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of what role does racism play in our culture? We saw that in the museum, and we were a part
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of the national dialogue of, you know, asking that question and other questions in terms
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of where we need to go forward. I want for the future what I've always wanted, and that is to create a space where people
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have intelligent discussions about race, race relations, and racism. And that's as good a legacy as any in a nation where people still struggle to talk about
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those things. We're in the early stages of raising money to build a two-stories stand-along, state at our facility
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We're doing great work now, but we're going to do greater work when it's built
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I think we have created a top-flight, objective documentation of our nation's past
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and that we're helping to create a path forward
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