Historical Image of the Day

Text:

"Coontown Sketches

"Parson Featherly: De Lawd hab took yo’ husban’ an’ lef’ yo’ wid six chilluns; but ‘membah, Sistah, dat dar’s some good in all de Lawd does.

"“I does, Parson. I realizes dat dar’s one less for me to perwide foh.”"

Life Magazine, 1899

This image is intended to demonstrate the laziness of black men and how they force women to provide for the family. This is a consistent trope in American racial history. Non-whites were constantly shown as lazy. Whites justified stealing Native American land by claiming they were lazy and did not use it to the fullest extent. Worse for hundreds of different writers, the men laid around while women did the day-to-day labor. This simply outraged Protestants. Similar claims were (and often still are) made of Mexicans and African-Americans, as we see in this image.