A Chapter in America’s Enduring Disregard for Black Lives
In the sweltering swamps of the American South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, alligator hides became the ultimate symbol of opulence. Prized for their durability and exotic texture, these skins fueled a booming luxury industry, transforming into high-end handbags, sleek shoes, belts, and even fashionable accessories for the elite. The demand surged after the Civil War, as European and American designers embraced the material for its association with adventure and wilderness. Hunters, often white men from rural communities, ventured into treacherous bayous armed with rifles and hooks, facing razor-sharp teeth, powerful tails, and the constant threat of death by drowning or mauling. For a single large hide, they could earn enough to sustain a family for months—up to $50 in the 1920s, equivalent to over $800 today. But as the risks mounted and the easy catches dwindled, innovation turned to exploitation. Rather than endanger their own lives, these hunters outsourced the peril to the most vulnerable: Black infants, stolen from enslaved or impoverished mothers, reduced to mere chum in the water.
The practice, chillingly dubbed “alligator bait,” wasn’t mere folklore—it was a documented atrocity born from the dehumanizing logic of white supremacy. Enslaved Black women, their bodies already commodified under chattel slavery, were forced to surrender their babies, sometimes mere months old, to these hunters. A coarse rope would be looped around the child’s waist and neck, like a leash on livestock, and the infant—often wailing in terror—would be dangled or placed at the water’s edge. The cries mimicked the distress calls of injured prey, drawing massive alligators to the surface with unerring instinct. Hunters lurked nearby, waiting for the reptile to lunge and clamp its jaws before firing a shot or stabbing with a hook. Intervention came only after the gator had taken the bait, if at all; the hide was the true prize, worth far more than any human collateral. Mothers, if they were lucky, might reclaim their child, battered but alive, perhaps for a pittance of $2 as “compensation.” But many babies didn’t survive the ordeal—crushed, drowned, or simply discarded as expendable. This wasn’t widespread enough to appear in every hunter’s ledger, but scattered eyewitness accounts and period reports confirm it happened enough to scar generations, a grim extension of slavery’s violence into the Jim Crow era.
One particularly grotesque example unfolded in Florida in 1923, as detailed in a syndicated article by journalist T.W. Villiers. In the murky waters near Tampa, hunters advertised for “pickaninnies”—a vile slur for Black children—to serve as live lures. A mother, desperate for the fee, allowed her toddler to be tied and positioned by a known alligator haunt. The child’s sobs echoed across the swamp until the beast emerged, head and forequarters breaking the surface in a thrash of scales and fury. Hidden marksmen struck true, killing the gator instantly. The baby was retrieved “in perfect condition,” the story crowed, with the mother pocketing her $2 and the hunters their haul. Villiers painted the scene with macabre whimsy: the alligators, he claimed, had a “fondness” for Black flesh, deeming it more “refreshing” than white, and the children emerged unscratched and even “glad” for the adventure. The tale ran in papers like the Oakland Tribune and Atlanta Independent, framing the horror as a quirky Southern yarn rather than child endangerment. Yet beneath the folksy veneer lay the ugly truth: Black lives as disposable tools for profit, a sentiment echoed in earlier reports, like a 1890 Roanoke Times piece reprinting a Ceylon advertisement for “Babies Wanted for Crocodile Bait,” which described similar tactics using “dark brown infants” for mere shillings.
This savagery didn’t confine itself to remote wetlands; it slithered into urban spectacles, blurring the line between reality and racist entertainment. On June 13, 1908, the Washington Times ran a headline that laid bare the casual cruelty: “Baits Alligators with Pickaninnies.” The subhead read, “Zoo Specimens Coaxed to Summer Quarters by Plump Little Africans.” At the New York Zoological Garden (now the Bronx Zoo), a keeper hatched a “gross idea” to rouse his lethargic reptiles from winter hibernation. Lacking conventional bait, he enlisted two “small colored children” wandering the reptile house as unwitting lures. The youngsters, described as plump and unwitting, were coaxed to the tank’s edge. The alligators, roused by their presence and the zoo’s myth of reptiles’ “fondness for the black man,” pursued them in frantic laps around the enclosure, grunting in frustration as they plunged into the water. Visitors watched the chaos unfold like a twisted vaudeville act, the children herded back to safety only after the saurians had been “coaxed” into their summer pens. The article treated it as innovative zookeeping, not endangerment, underscoring how deeply embedded the stereotype was—even in institutions meant for education and wonder.
What began as opportunistic brutality evolved into a cultural fetish, immortalized in memorabilia that celebrated Black suffering as quaint Americana. Postcards flooded the market from the 1890s onward, churning out thousands of images under titles like “Alligator Bait.” One 1897 lithograph by McCrary & Branson posed nine naked Black toddlers on a sandy bayou, their wide eyes and toothy grins exaggerated in caricature, selling over 11,000 copies and netting nearly $5,000—a fortune at the time. These “coon cards,” as they were derisively called, depicted infants tied to stakes, mid-chomp in alligator jaws, or fleeing en masse from snapping maws, often with captions like “Tourist: ‘Do you think it is safe to swim here?’ Attendant: ‘Yes, sah, de alligators won’t bite yo’—dey’s used to nigger bait.'” Production peaked in the early 1900s, with companies like Underwood & Underwood mass-producing them for tourists, who mailed them as souvenirs from Florida vacations.
By the Civil Rights era, the imagery lingered in parades and public floats, where papier-mâché alligators swallowed effigies of Black children whole amid cheers from segregated crowds—a festive nod to the “natural order” of racial hierarchy. Toys joined the parade: stuffed “Negro” dolls branded “alligator bait” flew off shelves in 1917, as noted in the New York Times, while early films like the 1900 short “Alligator Bait” showed a hunter rescuing a tied Black baby from a gator’s belly, turning trauma into spectacle. Songs and sheet music reinforced the trope, with lyrics in tunes like “Ugly Chile” sneering, “Oh how I hate you / You alligator bait you.” Even slang endured: “Gator bait” hurled as an insult at Black athletes, from a 1939 University of Florida crowd taunting rivals to Bob Gibson’s 1968 recollection of fans in Georgia jeering him with the slur, whispering that local kids were still used for the hunt.
These artifacts weren’t relics of a bygone savagery; they were active propaganda, normalizing the idea that Black children were subhuman—unkempt “pickaninnies” fit only for peril or punchlines. Scholars like Patricia Turner trace it to antebellum myths of alligators preferring “Negro flesh,” a “wishcasting” fantasy that justified lynchings and containment. As the trope persisted into the 1950s and beyond, it mirrored the era’s violence: school bombings, church arsons, and police brutality, all underscoring Black disposability.
Today, as we grapple with the senseless murders of Black lives—Ahmaud Arbery chased like prey, George Floyd gasping under a knee, or children gunned down in drive-bys—we see echoes of those swamp-bound infants. The disregard hasn’t vanished; it’s shape-shifted, from ropes in bayous to algorithms amplifying hate, from zoo tanks to viral memes. Reflecting on this history isn’t just mourning—it’s a call to dismantle the structures that still bait us for sport. Until then, the alligators lurk, waiting for the next cry to draw them near.