Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 17, 1990 TAG: 9007170022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WANDA R. YANCEY COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Ferguson found the figure at a local plant nursery two years ago, and he's proud of it.
"To me, it's a part of black history that I am not ashamed of," said Ferguson, 32, who is black. "To me, it's a reminder of the past and how far we have come."
The lawns of white America were dotted for decades with black caricatures in concrete - a stoic jockey standing along the drive, lantern in hand, a grinning shoeshine boy or an Aunt Jemima in the garden - but the figures went out of production with the decline of legal segregation.
Thirty years later, they are making a comeback, say experts in black culture and others.
"A lot of people buy them and send them up North to their family members for Christmas presents, or buy them as gag gifts," said Lane Bentley, who works with his father at Bentley's Nursery in Peachtree Corners, Ga. "We've been selling them for about seven years now. Business isn't great, but they do sell."
The resurgence of the ornaments could simply reflect an interest in antiques and Southern curiosities, observers of black culture say. Or, they suggest, some whites may use their lawn ornaments to send a message that may no longer be spoken.
"It could mean a sign of worsening times," said Charles Wilson, associate professor at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. "After the 1960s the general consensus was that it was out of bounds to display these statues, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore."
"I think it is frightening," said Kenneth Goings, chairman of the history department at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., a recognized expert on black caricatures. "There has been an incredible resurgence of these items all across the country."
Susanne and Ralph Dandridge bought a black jockey about four years ago and planted it alongside the driveway of their home in Berkeley Lake, a fashionable community in Gwinnett County, Ga.
"I guess I really didn't think about it when I bought it," Susanne Dandridge said. "I've always just thought they were neat looking. I'm very much interested in antiques and things from the past."
She said she never thought about possible racist overtones.
"I have several little black figurines in my house," she said. "We're from Charleston, and you know the flower ladies are real popular down there."
Goings, who has an extensive collection of black caricatures manufactured during the Jim Crow era, said the often crudely painted lawn ornaments were created shortly after the Civil War as a white backlash against the abolition of slavery and as an insult to the newly freed blacks.
"There was a period when some whites said, `What do we do with them? They are free but considered inferior. How do you define them?' " So they devised something that was demeaning to express their stereotypes," Goings said. "That's when the Aunt Jemimas came about, children with braids standing straight in the air and the grinning jockeys or the figures eating watermelon."
Kingston Statuary in Bartow County, Ga., began making the jockeys - known in the trade as "jockey boys" - about two years ago after receiving numerous requests, plant manager Jerry Strickland said.
"There isn't a huge market for it, but we get a lot of calls for them," he said.
"There is no racist connotation with these jockey boys these days. As a matter of fact, I delivered some of the jockey boys to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago and some black boys helped me take them off the truck. They didn't see anything wrong with them. They just laughed and thought it was funny," Strickland said.
At E.L. Duncan Cast Stone in Kennesaw, Ga., Duncan said he started selling the items again two years ago, after about a 23-year hiatus.
"Before Martin Luther King came along, they were in just about every yard around," said Duncan. "But after the civil rights movement, you couldn't give them away. No one wanted them.
"But two years ago, I got a lot of calls for them, so I reordered them. Now when someone calls, I have them in."
by CNB