Civil Rights Movement

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Antiques malls and flea markets are full of shameful reminders of America's racist history. You'll find endless blackface caricatures—mostly produced between the 1890s and the 1960s—on Mammy cookie jars, Sambo mechanical banks, "darkie"...
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Antiques malls and flea markets are full of shameful reminders of America's racist history. You'll find endless blackface caricatures—mostly produced between the 1890s and the 1960s—on Mammy cookie jars, Sambo mechanical banks, "darkie" shoe-polish tins and toothpaste tubes, postcards feature "pickaninny" children, and sheet music for minstrel-show tunes and vaudeville "coon songs." But fortunately for collectors, African American history doesn't have to be portrayed through the eyes of white bigots. Instead, you can tell the story through collectible mementoes of the heroic men and women who fought against slavery and then fought for civil rights. For example, passionate collectors can hunt down abolitionist newspapers, like "The Liberator" or "The North Star," carte-de-visites of abolitionist speaker Sojourner Truth or Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, daguerreotypes or ambrotypes of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as well as the myriad books or letters written in support of the cause. After the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery, new African American leaders emerged to fight for civil rights after the Civil War. Today, you can find books, articles, lectures, letters, and photographs of NAACP co-founders W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell, as well as educator Booker T. Washington and black nationalist Marcus Garvey. At the same time, the Harlem Renaissance in the early 20th century produced a wealth of music, dance, and literature by the likes of Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Zora Neale Hurston. The largest and most accessible field of such collectibles is from the Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and '60s and beyond. Objects related to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most celebrated icon of the movement, are both ubiquitous and coveted. Original photographs of King, books he signed, and artifacts from his time in the Southern Christian...
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