Conclusion
Bryan Le Beau argues that the Darktown prints “demonstrate less an editorial racism on the part of the firm than an indiscriminate instinct for marketable themes—and racism was marketable.” [1] This study has reevaluated this notion, arguing instead that not only were Currier & Ives savvy marketers aptly reading the wants and desires of white middle-class America during the nineteenth century, but that the firm reinforced Jim Crow, lynching, Lost Cause ideology, and white supremacy through a creation and mass dissemination of racist prints. Le Beau is on firmer ground when he analyzes the Gilded Age as a period during which “scientists and social scientists were propounding the natural inferiority of African Americans and the inappropriateness of their attempting to live in the white man’s world—presuming to live above their true station in life, even putting on airs in the process.” [2]
Vigilante “justice” based on “Lynch Law” was one of the central means by which the subjugation of African Americans was carried out during the late-nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries. This was facilitated in part by multifarious forms of burgeoning media. As Ida B. Wells wrote, “the men who make these charges encourage or lead the mobs which do the lynching. They belong to the race which holds Negro life cheap, which owns the telegraph wires, newspapers, and all the other communication with the outside world. They write the reports which justify lunching by painting the Negro as black as possible, and those reports are accepted by the press association and the world without question or investigation.” [3] Along with these newspapers, periodicals, journals, and later radio and film, the lithographs of Currier & Ives promoted racist stereotypes with violent underpinnings meant to uphold dominant white structures of power in the United States.
References
1. Bryan Le Beau, Currier and Ives: America Imagined, 216.
2. Le Beau, 232.
3. Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, 133.