Collections

Three caricature postcards depicting African Americans with stereotypical features and promoting racist views of African Americans, copyrighted 1913 and published by S. Bergman, New York. One postcard depicting a group of African American singers with one elderly gentleman shown sleeping in the front row, copyrighted 1897 and published by Knaffl and Brothers, Knoxville, Tennessee. And a postcard of soldiers lined up for dress parade at the Normal Institute in Hampton, Virginia, published by Louis Kaufmann and sons, Baltimore, Maryland.

Seven postcards circa 1910 which feature African Americans picking cotton, posing for a photo, and caricatures of racists stereotypical notions about African Americans during that time.

Three postcards circa 1900 depicting African Americans. One postcard shows workers in a peanut field, another features a child on a pile of picked cotton. The third is a picture of James Smith, posed seated with a cane in one hand and a hat in another. It states that he was age 93, born in 1813 and the oldest living man in Hampton, Virginia.

Collection includes materials documenting the daily activities of Gamma Phi Beta (Alpha Chi Chapter). Materials include pages from a scrapbook that contain stereotypical caricatures of east Asian and Native American people as well as derogatory language regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Collection also includes photographs of culturally insensitive events held in Sorority Court.

The Richard Wright collection, compiled by Richard Wright and orginally referred to by Wright as "The Richard Wright collection of Graphic Images of African Americans," focuses on the evolution of the Black American image in print media, cartoons and comics. Wright organized his own historical timeline titled "Good Clean Fun: Blacks in Comics," also referred to as "Clean Fun: Blacks in Comics," in a series of binders with artist biographies and time period summaries. Item titles have been retained from the original labels.