Alligator bait

The reasons for first identifying black babies as alligator bait are unknown, but the identification may be a consequence of earlier associations of African crocodiles – a relative of American alligators – with Africa and its people.[1] American alligators largely live in the swamplands of the Southern United States, which were one place people escaping enslavement hid to evade capture.[1] According to popular legend, enslaved people who disappeared in swamps may have been killed by alligators; children were understood as particularly vulnerable to attacks by alligators, and that identification may have evolved into the bait image.[1]

In the American popular imagination, both during and after legal slavery, black children were commonly used as bait for alligators, an apex predator of American folklore.[2] Drawings of black babies luring alligators were printed by companies like Underwood & Underwood[3] on postcards,[4] cigar boxes, sheet music covers,[5] and in paintings.[6] Several stories were printed in American newspapers about the alleged practice.[7] Due to the popularity of the idea, letter openers were manufactured in designs resembling alligators, some of which came equipped with small replicas of black children's heads to be placed in the alligator's mouth.[8] The sheet music drawings were almost purely symbolic; the images of black children being hunted by alligators were not represented in almost any corresponding music, though some songs (without the iconography) did have alligator bait as a component.[9] In general, the drawings reinforced the racist belief that black people were victims to nature,[10] and that their race made it reasonable to assume they should die terribly.[11] The image is a subtype of the racist pickaninny caricature and stereotype of black children, where they were represented as almost unhuman, filthy, and unlovable.[12]

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company produced a pair of short films in 1900[13] called The 'Gator and the Pickaninny and Alligator Bait. In the former, "a black man with an ax unhesitatingly attacks an alligator that has swallowed a small black boy; as a result, the boy, Jonah-like, is restored."[14] In the latter, according to the film-company catalog, "A little colored baby is tied to a post on a tropical shore. A huge 'gator comes out of the water, and is about to devour the little pickaninny, when a hunter appears and shoots the reptile."[15] The image of black children being put in peril to lure alligators remains in popular culture in the 21st century.[16]

"Alligator Bait" photograph published by McCrary & Branson, 1897 (International Center of Photography collection)

The title "Alligator Bait" for an 1897 photo montage of nine African-American babies posed "on a sandy bayou" was supposedly suggested by a hardware-store employee in Knoxville, Tennessee as part of a naming contest with a cash prize. By 1900, the photo had sold 11,000 copies and brought in US$5,000 (equivalent to about $162,860 in 2021) for McCrary & Branson.[17][18] In 1964, a New Jersey editorial writer recalled a copy of the photo—meant to "elicit an amused appreciation"—that had once hung in a local shop. The newspaper editor described the image as "immoral" and equivalent to "viciously pornographic pictures."[19]

The idea that anyone was seriously using children to catch alligators was debunked in print as early as 1918; a Florida guidebook reassured potential tourists that "upon reliable authority [an alligator] will not attack a human, regardless of the fiction that pickaninnies are good alligator bait."[20] In 1919 a Port St. Lucie newspaper column complained, "Many years ago this serious error was perpetrated on Florida by an advertising agent of a railroad running through the South...Florida's portion was [advertised with] pictures of moss hung swamps, rattlesnakes, alligators, and negro babies labelled 'alligator bait'... this harmful psychology became very popular..doubtless many foreigners believing that these babies were actually used for alligator bait."[21]

In May 2013, Franklin Hughes of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia argued that due to the number of periodicals which mention the use of black children as bait for alligators, it likely occurred, though it was not widespread or became a normal practice.[7] Four years later, Hughes argued again that it likely occurred, though he also found an article from Time magazine, contemporaneous to one alleged incident printed in newspapers, which denied that the practice ever occurred and that the report was a "silly lie, false and absurd".[22]

A Snopes article from 2017 was unable to find any meaningful evidence that the practice occurred; Patricia Turner, a historian on black folklore and the alligator bait cultural phenomenon, told Snopes it likely never did.[23] The Snopes writer said it was impossible to prove a negative claim, and that no proponents of the historicity of the practice have met their burden of proof by providing any evidence of the practice, although the trope of black children being the favorite food of alligators was already widespread in the antebellum United States.[23] For example, an 1850 article in Fraser's Magazine reported the belief that alligators "prefer the flesh of a negro to any other delicacy".[24]

In American slang, alligator bait (or 'gator bait) is a chiefly Southern slur aimed at black people, particularly children; the term implies that the target is worthless and expendable.[25] The slur dates from the early 1900s or before.[26] University of Florida fans were using the "uncomplimentary phrase" against Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets players in 1939.[27] In 1968 Major League Baseball pitcher Bob Gibson recalled the slur being used against him while playing in Columbus, Georgia: "There was a particular fan there who used to ride me. He called me alligator bait. But then I found out just for kicks local folks would tie Negro youngsters to the end of a rope and drag them through swamps, trying to lure the alligators...That's where Negroes stood in Columbus."[28] The sports page editor in Columbus, Georgia wrote a column castigating Gibson for bringing it up: "All local citizens, white and Negro, have already recognized [alligator bait] for the myth that it is...I wouldn't be naive enough to deny that there were probably some rough things hurled at Gibson...but swamps and alligators? Really, Bob?"[29] In 2020, the University of Florida ended the "Gator Bait" chant during athletic events; university historian Carl Van Ness said the chant likely started after the 1950s, and though it may not have originated from the racial slur, the two were connected.[30]

The concept of children luring predators separately existed in colonial Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka). Ceylonese children were said to have been used as bait for crocodiles, and several newspapers published stories and drawings of the purported practice.[31]

• Gator bait (disambiguation)
• Nadir of American race relations

• King, Wilma (2005). "The Long Way from the Gold Dust Twins to the Williams Sisters: Images of African American Children in Selected Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Print Media". African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 119–136. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-73165-7_8. ISBN 978-1-4039-6251-5.
• Turner, Patricia A. (1994). "Alligator Bait". Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (1st ed.). New York: Anchor Books. pp. 31–40. ISBN 978-0-385-46784-1.