The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, in Michigan, US, contains a vast range of posters, toys and signs depicting shocking stereotypes of African American people.
It includes outdated theories of evolution, instructions on how to “black up” for the theatre and even a full-size replica of a lynching tree.
The collection, which makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing in the modern day, is said to be the largest of its kind in the world.
It was amassed by the founder and curator of the museum David Pilgrim, who began collecting the pieces as a teenager.
Mr Pilgrim, who is black himself, said the exhibit was “not a shrine to racism” but was about teaching
The collection includes a series of signs taken from shops and public transport, declaring “Colored: seated in rear” while one business slogan reads: “Our business is black but we treat you white.”
Others show prevalent use of now-unacceptable terms including n----- and c—n.
One bizarre poster appears to show the evolution between a watermelon and a black man, and another captures a baby drinking from an inkwell with the caption “N----- milk”.
Another shows four young black children sitting by a river, with the caption "Alligator bait".
Other parts of the collection were originally intended to be toys or household objects, with dolls, bottle openers and a tea pot styled in the head of a black man
Man are said to be stereotyped as lazy, violent “beasts” while women are depicted largely as “mammies” or “Jezebels”.
Disturbingly, the collection even continues to the modern day with items from the Obama presidential campaign.
The museum’s website declares its aim to use “objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice” and says it “strives to become a leader in social activism and in the discussion of race and race relations.
The £1.3m Jim Crow Museum, based at Ferris State University, aims to provide a timeline of the “African American experience in the United States” from pre-slavery through the civil rights movements to the modern day.
Mr Pilgrim, a former sociology professor at Ferris State, started the collection in the 1970s in Alabama and said he spent most of his free time and money on acquisitions.
In 1996, Mr Pilgrim donated his 2,000-piece collection to the school, where it spent the next 15 years housed in a single room.
Now made up of 9,000 pieces, much of the collection will be put on general display to the public.
He wrote on the museum’s website: “I am a garbage collector, racist garbage.
“For three decades I have collected items that defame and belittle Africans and their American descendants.
“I have a parlor game, "72 Pictured Party Stunts," from the 1930s. One of the game's cards instructs players to, "Go through the motions of a colored boy eating watermelon." The card shows a dark black boy, with bulging eyes and blood red lips, eating a watermelon as large as he is.
“The card offends me, but I collected it and 4,000 similar items that portray blacks as Coons, Toms, Sambos, Mammies, Picaninnies, and other dehumanizing racial caricatures.
“I collect this garbage because I believe, and know to be true, that items of intolerance can be used to teach tolerance.
“A confrontation with the visual evidence of racism - especially thousands of items in a small room - is frequently shocking, even painful.
“Our goal is not to shock visitors. Our goal is to use items of intolerance to teach tolerance.”
Mr Pilgrim said most visitors felt a kind of “reflective sadness” when seeing the artefacts, and added he hoped to “engage people in dialogue”.
The museum is named after Jim Crow, the name often used to describe the segregation laws which continued in the US until the mid-1960s.
The exhibition will open on April 26.
[[MAYBE THIS WOULD BREAK THIS DIVISION AN SELF HATE WE GOT GOING ON THATS KILLING US]]
AN YEPPP SIRR I WOULD TAKE MY KIDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
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