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   With a traveling exhibit and plans for expansion, Ferris' Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has become a sought-after national resource.

    The message at the bottom of Sociology Professor David Pilgrim's e-mails pretty much says it all: "I don't want to live in a country where people can't sell racist garbage, but I do want to live in a country where no one buys it."
    This past year Pilgrim, founder and curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, helped organize a traveling exhibition of artifacts from the museum. He also is involved in raising $2 million to establish and staff a permanent exhibition space for the 4,000-plus items he has collected over the years, putting them to use in educating people about racial stereotypes.

The World Comes Calling

    "When we build our new space, it's going to blow peoples' minds off their hinges," Pilgrim says at the opening of the exhibition, "Hateful Things: Objects from the Jim Crow Museum," which premiered at Ferris' own Rankin Center Gallery. The disturbing objects range from the mundane to the horrific: advertisements for Aunt Jemima pancake flour, a photograph of a lynching, another photo of African American babies labeled "Alligator Bait" and a board game called "Ghettopoly" based on racial stereotypes.
    "The reality is that we're producing a generation of people who are historically ignorant and are belligerent in their ignorance," says Pilgrim. "They don't have a basis for understanding the kind of racial and gender-based problems we have in our society. Before we can change them we have to educate them, and this exhibition is a small step in that direction."
   

In addition to its many racist images the museum also contains icons of the civil rights struggle, such as signs worn by marchers and documentary photos, here framed together.

Even from its modest current home consisting of a single room, the Jim Crow Museum has become a national resource. The New York Times turned to Pilgrim for comment about the controversy over a new edition of the book Little Black Sambo; the BBC traveled to the museum to interview him for a documentary concerning former English soccer coach and pundit Ron Atkinson who was fired over racist on-air comments; and the Associated Press asked him for his insights into the buying and selling of racist artifacts on eBay. There have been many more such requests.
    The museum's resources have been widely circulated through the Internet. Its "virtual museum" features images of artifacts, scholarly articles and links. (Last year a segment of MTV's Real World program showed students searching for information on racism via the Web and accessing the Jim Crow site.)
    With the success of the virtual museum came the realization that the educational possibilities of the actual collection were being severely limited by its current home. Plans are in the works to change that.

From Ignorance to Hopefulness

    While looking at blueprints designed by the architectural firm of Neumann/Smith and Associates for the new facility, Social Sciences Department Head John Thorp explains how the University plans to transform an area in the Arts and Sciences Commons into a permanent home for the museum.
    "The new space will make it possible for many more people to encounter the collection," says Thorp. "As far as we know, this is the largest publicly available collection of this kind of material. Right now we only have guided group tours due to its small space, but more importantly, because there's no interpretive material."
    Thorp and Pilgrim envision taking visitors to the new facility on a journey "from ignorance to violence to disgust to pride and, finally, to hopefulness," as Pilgrim puts it.
    The expanded space will allow the museum to tell stories and show relationships between objects of material culture and their effects on society that the museum's current cramped quarters can only partially portray.
    Entrance to the exhibit will be through a "Colored Only" door, immediately steeping visitors in the reality of the Jim Crow segregation laws. There will also be separate "Colored" and "White" drinking fountains.
    "Then you go into the fire," Pilgrim says of the exhibits that will explore the relationship between Jim Crow and violence, including lynchings.
    "After that, you'll walk through the mouth of the 'Coon Chicken Inn' porter," explains Pilgrim. "We'll have descriptive panels and nine-foot-tall cabinets where people will see just an astonishing number of items." A model kitchen and living room will incorporate many "ordinary" artifacts to show how racist objects made their way into everyday life.
    The "hopefulness" Pilgrim envisions will be celebrated through highlighting the achievements of African Americans in a wide range of areas ("including people who are not in textbooks, a lot of people we just don't hear about," Pilgrim notes.) The new museum also will document the Civil Rights movement. There will be an area with tiered seating for showing videos about the history of the movement and discussing strategies for racial healing.

The Necessity of Memory

    "One day, people all over this country are going to know about the museum," Pilgrim says as viewers continue to confront the "Hateful Things" on display in the Rankin Gallery. "And on the day we move out of our current location, we're going to move items about sexism into the current location and call it the Sarah Baartman Room." He pauses, contemplating this new possibility. "Ferris will one day be a national leader in the scholarly analysis of racism and sexism," he says.
   

Ferris' Rankin Center Gallery premiered the traveling exhibit "Hateful Things: Objects from the Jim Crow Museum" last fall, highlighting the need for the museum's expansion to pursue its goal of racial understanding and healing.

The challenge of placing items of intolerance into their proper perspective to make them work against their original purpose takes careful consideration. For "Hateful Things," Pilgrim worked with Rankin Gallery Director Carrie Weis-Taylor to find the right way to exhibit the objects. Weis-Taylor explains that their goal was to keep the focus on the objects as artifacts rather than art.
    "When you go to a gallery or a museum and see something in a Plexiglas case or a frame, that automatically separates it and makes a statement about it being either beautiful or valuable or something to be appreciated," she says. "These things are being displayed here in the gallery, but they're very different from fine art objects." To that end, Weis Taylor kept the presentation simple: plain black frames with brown backgrounds, or plain plastic cubes for the three-dimensional objects.
    Until funds are raised and the new space built, such projects as the Web site (www.ferris.edu/jimcrow), the traveling exhibit and Jim Crow's Museum, a documentary produced by Pilgrim and Television and Media Production Professor Clayton Rye (which won numerous awards at film festivals), allow the museum to reach out to communities across the state and country. A number of Michigan colleges and universities have hosted "Hateful Things," including Delta College, Aquinas College and Grand Valley State University. It also is slated to travel to Milwaukee, Wis., where it will be featured at the 2005 NAACP National Convention and the Black Holocaust Museum.
    Thorp hopes the new museum will allow the exhibits to have the kind of impact on future visitors that they've had on him. "A couple of weeks ago in church the pastor decided to sing 'We Shall Overcome.' There's one line in there 'We shall not be afraid,' that I used to sing in the 60s, without a second thought. I didn't know what there was to be afraid of then. Now I do," he says.
    To overcome the effects of racism, he and Pilgrim know that its hateful legacy must be remembered. They have the plans in hand to make that goal a reality.