Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

About Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michigan, displays a wide variety of artifacts depicting the history of racist portrayals of African Americans in American popular culture. The mission of the Jim Crow Museum is to use objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice.

As of 2024, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia had a collection of over 30,000 objects, primarily created between the 1870s and the 1960s. It also includes contemporary objects. The museum is named after Jim Crow, a song-and-dance caricature of black people that by 1838 had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When at the end of the 19th century American legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against blacks, these statutes became known as the Jim Crow laws.

The museum demonstrates how racist ideas and anti-black images were pervasive within American culture. It also displays artifacts related to contemporary forms of racism, stories about African American achievements, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Text from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Founded
1996

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Nearby museums

Make a day of it. 4 more museums are within 27 miles of Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia; the closest, Ferris State University Fine Art Gallery, is about a mile away.