Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Chapter 3 centers on Sambo art, a genre of art that utilized racist imagery on everyday objects. Sambo art presented Black and white people in oppositional terms, characterizing the former as deceitful, ugly, evil, and uncivilized. Gates argues that Sambo images, which were easily consumed, digested, and internalized, formed part of a rhetoric of terrorism throughout the Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow eras. The images reinforced the racism of the courts, politicians, journalists, and novelists, normalizing the idea that Black people were subhuman.

Sambo art appeared in varied contexts, including books, trading cards, advertisements, children’s games, potholders, and other everyday objects. Their popularity was such that when a white person encountered a Black person, they already had fixed notions of that person’s character. Gates singles out lynching postcards as a subgenre of anti-Black Sambo imagery. Alongside other racist images and texts, these postcards emboldened white people to commit murder. The visual rhetoric of white supremacy eroded Reconstruction gains and drowned out the achievements of Black people. The New Negro movement, in which Black Americans crafted a counternarrative to white supremacy, strived to subvert these racist stereotypes.