Washington Square Antiques

Dark Town Prints

I own a service which markets photos of the past. A lot of them are attractive or interesting in their very own right, but to me one of one of the most essential things about the old prints we offer is that they are historic artifacts. That is, they are evidence from our past, bringing their tales to today. They tell us not only about things they reveal, but additionally about what was of passion to the public at the time—or at the very least what their publishers believed would be of passion—and they tell us just how the public at the time saw its globe residential painting.

Past public mindsets are not always ones we agree with, nor even excuse, but I have lengthy argued that it is a mistake to overlook or trash historic artifacts that show ideas we do not agree with. As George Santayana created, “Those that can not keep in mind the past are condemned to repeat it.” That is, it is crucial for us to find out about our past to ensure that we can attempt to fix where we have failed. Therefore, even abhorrent historic artifacts should be maintained and examined.

Our method operandi has actually always been, that even if I did not agree with what a particular print shown, we would offer it for sale to ensure that somebody curious about it—with any luck for historic reasons—might have accessibility to it. On that particular basis, though I hate the social effects of the Currier & Ives Darktown prints, I have felt it appropriate to have my shop offer them for sale. I no more feel that to be the case.

So, what are the Currier & Ives Darktown prints? They are a collection of prints which America’s most effective popular printmaker made from the late 1870s into the 1890s, revealing allegedly funny episodes in Darktown, a segregated neighborhood of black Americans. Darktown prints showcased a full range of adverse stereotypes of the former servants that relocated north after the Civil Battle. Represented as mentally slow, literally grotesque, and ethically unconcerned, African Americans were shown as comically inefficient in their attempts to “play-act” at being white.

Horrifyingly, these prints were amongst one of the most popular of all Currier & Ives prints, with one image allegedly selling as numerous as 73,000 duplicates. Why that was so and what it indicates are points worth attempting to understand, and there have been establishments and scholars that have come close to the Darktown collection by doing this. I believe that is important for our understanding of our past as well as additionally of our existing to look at these problems.

This after that raises the inquiry of why I have determined we would no more offer the Darktown prints. Absolutely, to simply offer such a print is not to advocate for its racist message; we have marketed them for years despite the fact that I believe what they reveal is terrible. As it takes place, mostly all of the Darktown prints we have marketed have been to academic establishments or to African American enthusiasts. Still, I now think we should not be selling them at all.

The current national reexamination of our society’s racial injustices has actually made me rethink just how we should treat these prints. I have concerned think that even if one does absent them as something one believes, racist images like these should not exist to the public, except in a clearly restricted historic/educational venue. To have images like these out in public— on screen in a shop, at a show or on the web—produces a social environment which is damaging to universal racial equality.

The factor is that it is not what you suggest by selling the prints, it is what they reveal and just how that includes in the adverse experience that African Americans have in our society. This is really comparable to the concern of the screen of Confederate sculptures in the South, and as I think those sculptures should be obtained of public rooms, so as well I think the Darktown prints should be eliminated from public display. Every image that is out in public demonstrating how in the past Blacks were considered inferior includes in the history sound insidiously murmuring that they are not equal today. Their screen, even if not meant in this manner, advises both Blacks and Whites that in the not as well distant past it was the social norm that the last considered themselves to be above the former. This, in effect, enters into the systemic message of racial inequality that still penetrates our nation.

We need to effect numerous adjustments to cause true racial equality in our nation, both as a culture and as individuals, and I believe no more selling or displaying the Darktown prints is something we can do to help, albeit in a little way. On that particular basis, we are contributing every one of our current supply of Darktown prints to academic establishments, taking the images out of the general public environment and relegating them to the vaults of historic establishments. This is certainly simply a little step towards racial equality, but with any luck it is among numerous such small actions our society will certainly now be making.