Kevin Middleton

September 25, 2015

Professor Gulla
Jacob Lawrence Migration Series

Symbol: a thing that represents or stands for

something else.
Birds, particularly, black birds, were frequently used
to represent black men and black women in musical,
stories, and films. Jim Crow was just a person, yet it
affected the lives of many people in different ways.
This deplorable ideology came to personify the
system of racial oppression and segregation in the
United States.

Thomas Rice was born on May 20th 1808. He was a

white entertainer and playwright who popularized the
Jim Crow character in shows.
In his shows he used African-American vernacular,
song, and dance to become one of the most wellknow entertainers of his age. He learned to absorb
the overall experience of blacks. He dressed in rags,
battered hats and torn shoes. Rice even went as far
as to impersonating Negro slaves. He blackened his
face and hands and would sing songs like, Turn
about and wheel about, and do just so. And every
time I turn about I Jump Jim Crow!
Rice began to suffer from a certain type of paralysis
as early as 1840. The paralysis began to debilitate
his speech and movements. It eventually led to his
death on September 19, 1860.

Racist caricatures were so prevalent, that it was even

seen in cartoons. During the 1930s and 1940s,
movies like Dumbo showed the reality of racism and
what whites truly saw black people as.
There were six different types of caricatures that
illustrated what blacks were seen as:
The old wise man
The dominant mother

The jolly man

The slow man
Vagabond
Poor man .