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.
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