Jolly Darkie Target Game
Cover of box, partially damaged
PublishersMcLoughlin Brothers
Publication1890 (1890)
Years activeAbout 1890–1915
Playerstwo or more
Setup timeless than one minute

The Jolly Darkie Target Game was a game developed and manufactured by the McLoughlin Brothers (now part of Milton Bradley Company)[1] which was released in 1890.[2] It was produced until at least 1915.[3] Other companies produced similar games, such as Alabama Coon by J. W. Spear & Sons.

Description

The objective of the game was to throw a wooden ball into a bullseye, the "gaping mouth" of the target in cardboard decorated using imagery of Sambo[2][4] and that could open and close.[5] It was one of many products and media of late 19th century in the United States depicting African Americans as "beasts" and associating the black male face Sambo images with racial slur terms such as "coon", "darky", "nigger", and "pickaninny".[2] Among these was another Milton Bradley game, Darky's Coon Game.[2] The term "darkie" referred to the "exaggerated physiognomic features" depicting black people and associated with minstrel shows.[6] In the book Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture, Patricia Turner reported that she had heard of a black man sitting outside a theatre preceding a minstrel show, with his mouth open and children throwing balls into it for entertainment.[6] The Cuban poet and journalist José Martí witnessed a similar scene at Coney Island and wrote about it.[7]

It was one of many games produced at the time with a theme involving violence against black people, who were "encountering growing hostility" throughout the United States.[8] The game depicted "a symbolic form of violence" that reinforced the servitude of black people.[9] Another game with a more obvious theme of violence was "Hit the Dodger! Knock him Out!".[8] It was also one of the objects produced at the time featuring a mouth and "black ingestion" as a stereotype of African Americans, such as the watermelon stereotype, also exemplified by the "Jolly Nigger Bank" into which coins are inserted into a mouth-shaped slot.[5] The target consumer for the game was white people, who bought it for their children.[3][4] These games and images reinforced "an encompassing theme of domination" by white people and subordination of black people.[10] Turner states that such products reflected means by which "American consumers found acceptable ways of buying and selling the souls of black folk" even after the abolition of slavery in the United States, and the use of black images in advertising "figured prominently in commodity capitalism".[11]

Today, the game is considered a collector's item.[12] It is part of collectable black memorabilia, consisting of objects such as dolls, toys, and postcards that include those that are offensive or racist,[3] even the "most contemptible examples" of such works.[13] By 1993, there were about 50,000 black memorabilia collectors in the United States, about 70% of whom were African Americans.[14]

Notes

  1. ↑ Congdon-Martin 1990, p. 46.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Booker 2000, p. 124.
  3. 1 2 3 Washington Afro-American 1986.
  4. 1 2 Turner 1994, p. 11.
  5. 1 2 Tompkins 2012, p. 194.
  6. 1 2 Jackson 2006, p. 23, From minstrel paraphernalia and games to minstrel shows.
  7. ↑ Arroyo 2013, p. 199, Note 78.
  8. 1 2 Congdon-Martin 1990, p. 16.
  9. ↑ Barton & Somerville 2016, p. 53-54.
  10. ↑ Ross Barnett 1982, p. 44.
  11. ↑ Hill Collins 2006, p. 314, Note 2.
  12. ↑ Dant 1999, p. 150.
  13. ↑ Markovich 2000, p. 11.
  14. ↑ Gutloff 1993, p. 36.

References

  • Arroyo, Jossianna (April 2013). Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137305152.
  • Barton, Christopher P.; Somerville, Kyle (2016). Historical racialized toys in the United States. Guides to historical artifacts. Vol. 4. Routledge. ISBN 9781315528885.
  • Booker, Christopher Brian (2000). "I Will Wear No Chain!": A Social History of African-American Males. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0275956377. LCCN 99086221.
  • Hill Collins, Patricia (September 2006). "New commodities, new consumers" (PDF). Ethnicities. SAGE Publications. 6 (3): 293–317. doi:10.1177/1468796806068322. ISSN 1468-7968. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-12-28. Retrieved 2014-12-28.
  • Congdon-Martin, Douglas (1990). Images in Black: 150 years of Black collectibles. Schiffer Publishing. ISBN 0887402739.
  • Dant, Tim (1999). Material Culture In The Social World (reprint ed.). Open University Press. ISBN 033519821X. OCLC 9914375.
  • Gutloff, Karen (February 1993). "Memorabilia means money". Black Enterprise. Earl G. Graves, Ltd. 23 (7). ISSN 0006-4165.
  • Jackson, Ronald L. Jr. (2006). Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media. SUNY series, Negotiating Identity: Discourses, Politics, Processes, and Praxes. State University of New York Press. ISBN 9780791466254.
  • Markovich, Alex, ed. (2000). The Art and History of Black Memorabilia. Larry Vincent Buster. C. Potter. ISBN 0609604252.
  • Ross Barnett, Marguerite (February 1982). "Nostalgia as nightmare: Blacks and American popular culture". The Crisis. The Crisis Publishing Company. 89 (2): 42–45. ISSN 0011-1422.
  • Tompkins, Kyla Wazana (2012). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York University Press. ISBN 9780814770054. LCCN 2011051505.
  • Turner, Patricia A. (1994). Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture. Anchor Books. ISBN 0385467842.
  • "Black memorabilia - new focal point for collectors". Washington Afro-American. 18 November 1986. p. 3.

Further reading

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