The gut-wrenching history of black babies and alligators

[qnr]

I'd heard of this in the past, but I'd never had occasion to follow up on it and get more information. This just breaks my heart.


Last week, 2-year-old Lane Graves was attacked and killed by an alligator in central Florida. We should all mourn the death of this innocent child. And empathize with a family whose grief will no doubt be punishing and eternal. As a father, it hurts to even imagine. My thoughts are with that family.

Since the attack, Florida officials have euthanized five alligators and plan to eliminate more. Obviously, killing those alligators will not bring back Lane and offers no real solace to the family. But it hammers home one important American belief: Animals’ lives are less significant compared with that of a human child.

Just a few weeks ago, a gorilla was killed at the Cincinnati Zoo after it injured a 3-year-old boy after the boy fell into the animal’s enclosure. It was tragic that the gorilla was killed, but the zoo officials did the right thing because a child’s life is sacred.

Can you imagine an America when that was not true? Can you imagine an America when a child’s life was so insignificant that he was intentionally put into the pen of a dangerous zoo animal? An America when a child was intentionally placed at the edge of alligator-infested waters to lure the ferocious beast for hunters?

The gut-wrenching history of black babies and alligators

Note: Originally posted in The Lounge by mistake, that post will be deleted.

[uppityperson]

1. what an awful graphic. k&r

[yourpaljoey]

2. Whoa!

[clarice]

3. Loathsome.nt

[In_The_Wind]

4. I can remember hearing about that over 50 years ago when I was young.

K&R

[qnr]

5. Yeah, it was about that long ago for me, too n/t

[etherealtruth]

6. I had never heard of this horrific act

.... until now

[pinboy3niner]

7. Never heard of it, but we had a Sambo's restaurant for a while

With murals of "Little Black Sambo" on the walls. And this was in a Los Angeles suburb.

At least that restaurant didn't last very long before becoming something else.

[intrepidity]

9. Was that down by the beach?

Near the Santa Monica pier, or around Pico or something? I seem to recall that.

[pinboy3niner]

11. This one was in the San Fernando Valley near Monroe High School, mid-'60s. nt

[qnr]

10. I remember them, and all of the controversy around them.

It's funny how things that start innocently enough (the names of the two founders) can devolve. There wasn't really a lot of thought going on there, it seems, once they decided to embrace the book.

[rug]

8. The article links to this practice in the Bronx Zoo 40 years after the 13th Amendment.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1908-06-13/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1836&sort=relevance&rows=20&words=ALLIGATORS+BAITS&search&sequence=0&index=16&state=&date2=1922&proxtext=Alligator+bait&y=0&x=0&dateFilter&page=4

"ebony mites"

[qnr]

14. I know, it's very disturbing.

I'm still following the chain of links originating in the original article.

[brer cat]

12. OMG!

No words will suffice.

[qnr]

16. Yeah - I think the thing that makes it worse was that people made light of it. n/t

[Igel]

13. Rare, but horrible.

Note that one of the instances, though, was in Ceylon. When you have to start resorting to overseas stories to buttress the frequency of domestic events, you have thin stats. Another incident was denied--which, if the practice was common, would have been strange.

Kids back then weren't coddled. They hired young children to walk girders in construction sites that were too dangerous and precarious for adult men. They worked in glassworks, in mines, in canneries. They shucked oysters, which requires dexterity, a very sharp knife, and often yields the loss of fingers. The time you're talking about 18% of workers were under 16, and that's considered to be an understatement. Middle school wasn't yet required. In some places, elementary school wasn't. Don't project back how people, even parents, treated children based on what it was like in the 1950s or later. Child labor laws remade the childhood landscape.

So alligator baiting probably happened, one of your links says, but it was rare.Some of the reports are hearsay, even if they were accepted by somebody who is in the "I want to believe" camp. The Washington Times story is as exceptional as the Jewish pogrom next to it. It made the news, not the statistical almanac. Whether people treated either story with shock, amusement, or ennui, I can't say. There's truth to this, but it's part and parcel of the whole "picnic" wave of not-quite-justified outrage that surfaced in the '90s. Just as the Internet was going and everybody found their little niche group.

The point is that it was cruel and racist, but in a cruel and racist society that was, moreover, exceedingly ... I don't know if "classist" is the right word ... pragmatic, perhaps. If you had kids that weren't in school anyway, in a situation where their parents were shipping them off to work in sweatshops and canneries and even climbing girders a dozen or more stories off the ground, where the money was needed and the labor cheap, plentiful, and compliant, the racism becomes glaring but secondary. Yes, alligators are dangerous. But so're climbing girders and dealing with bobbins and shucking oysters and working with red-hot glass.

Still, I don't know that the $50 the two black kids' mother was given was worth it. (Yeah, $2, but this was a while back.) Even if the zookeepers were also at great risk. By training I can put myself in various historical situations and have a decent gut feeling, but early 1900s America isn't one of them.

[qnr]

15. Whether it actually happened or not (and it did, in some instances) the fact that

people could make light of it with advertisements, humor, postcards, etc. is disheartening.