Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors Stories from the Jim Crow Museum

Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors examines the origins and significance of several longstanding anti-black stories and the caricatures and stereotypes that undergird them. It features images from the Jim Crow Museum, the nation's largest publicly accessible collection of racist objects. These pictures document the social injustice that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as a pus-filled boil “which must be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” Each chapter concludes with a story from the author's journey, challenging the integrity of racial narratives.

Debby Irving is an educator and the author of Waking Up White. David Pilgrim is a professor, orator, and human rights activist, best known as the founder and curator of the Jim Crow Museum, located at Ferris State University.