Rare AfAm Dandy Bull’s Eye Tobacco Trade Card
$300.00
Original period item
- Type
- Trade card · Advertising
- Subjects
- Advertising
- Era
- 1880s
Rare TC for Bull’s Eye Tobacco showing a dandy dressed AfAm man smoking a clay pipe and holding a target on his back. The racially-charged motifs are clear. Clay & Co Litho out of Buffalo created the piece. Colors vibrant. In late nineteenth-century American advertising, the Black "dandy" became a stock caricature that turned Black ambition into a racial joke. The figure descended from the minstrel character Zip Coon, which cultural critic John Strausbaugh describes as the first popular minstrel personality to represent the "black urban dandy," a Black man mocked for "acting white", and whose humor came from failed attempts to imitate upper-class white culture. Advertisers carried this figure onto trade cards and postcards, portraying Black men in particularly fancy, sometimes outlandish clothing. One Philadelphia saloon's card series, for example, captioned an image "A New Coon in Town" and showed a dandy with a cigarette, grey bowler, purple jacket with a flower boutonnière, and loudly mismatched checkered pants and red socks. By pairing the epithet "coon" with exaggerated finery, these ads cast Black social mobility as pretension and absurdity, reinforcing white supremacy and hostility toward African Americans while selling everyday goods (Gregory C. Wilson Collection, n.d.; Library Company of Philadelphia, ca. 1886). References Gregory C. Wilson collection of postcards and trade cards depicting stereotypes of African Americans (GRA 0148, Box 3, Folder F1: Dandy stereotypes, 1882, 1950, undated). Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, DE. https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/33595 Library Company of Philadelphia. (ca. 1886). Set of six African American caricature trade cards advertising Franz Aman, wine, liquor, and lager beer saloon, no. 727 North Second Street, Philadelphia [Graphic]. https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool%3A130968 Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. (n.d.). Coon Chicken Inn. University of Washington. https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/coon_chicken.shtml
