JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2572

I’ve written a number of times about tertiary,  massively incorporated examples of racist behavior in the pre-WWII United States. Impossibly bad stuff that we would never think of as having any place anywhere today was sort of every place everywhere 75+ years ago.  The racist imagery seems to spontaneously occur in places where there just wasn’t any “point” for it, but there it was, a sort of non-sequitur of half-conscious social quiet-loathing.

Tonight’s examples were inspired by a Twitter post by Ward Harkavy (https://twitter.com/WHarkavy) on an incredible piece of social propaganda: a patent for rifle shooting game in which the target is an African American. (It is interesting in and of itself that the inventor thought enough of his invention to patent it so that no one would steal his idea.)

There it is: the “Electric target machine with reversing target”, by William P. Falkenberg and James R. Hall, U.S. Patent # 2188292 A, 1939/1940. “Our invention relates to an improvement in electric target rifle ranges and has for one purpose the provision of an improved target”, the target being  Black man. Well, a Black man carrying a chicken, though it could be that “or any other suitable target”, whatever that was.  (The folks applying for the patent actually used the word “negro” with a small “N”, even though by about this time the fight to deprive African Americans of even the capitalization of the name of the race was over by about 10 years, though there were obvious pockets of resistance.)

“…simulate a negro [sic] carrying a chicken,

or any other suitable design.”

 From the patent report:

• “…#54 which may for example simulate a negro carrying a chicken, or any other suitable design.”
• “We illustrate, however, means for reversing the movement of the target structure in response to every hit so that the negro, if hit, may reverse his direction of movement.”

I did a quick search on Google Patents and found a few more examples of this extreme passive-aggressive form of racism.  The second is from 1923,  a “Pursuit toy”, U.S. Patent # 1588143 A, by Joseph A. Ross, 1923.  The toy consisted of a cop who would spin ’round and ’round trying to catch/club a Black man whose head would pop up from a sewer cover.  The figure that the cop was chasing according to the report was “in the Form of a negro [sic] or any fugitive”.  The profile of the toy shows a cutaway of the patrolman (with raised baton) and the African American head (in the drawing beneath) coming up and through the manhole cover.