Facing the past

The Black History 101 Mobile Museum

By Orisanmi Burton
Photography by Khalid El-Hakim

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Boy on a pot with a watermelon.America has a problem with race,” says Khalid El-Hakim, a 36-year old Detroit public school teacher, activist and founder of the Black History 101Mobile Museum, a collection of more than 1,500 artifacts that span the African-American experience. “In order to get beyond that problem we must deal with it at the root.”

El-Hakim’s personal motivations for beginning the museum were buttressed by his belief that African-Americans must elevate their consciousness so they can dismantle ideologies perpetuating selfhatred. He acquired his first piece in 1991 during a brief stop at a Tennessee gas station. He was astonished to find beside the cash register and among the requisite lighters and trinkets a small figurine of a black boy using a pot as a toilet and eating a slice of watermelon. He vividly recalls this moment as his first personal encounter with an unequivocally racist image. Instead of directing his anger and confusion toward the gas station attendant, he says his heart and mind were inspired to respond differently. He wanted to document this finding so that others could learn from it.

Images of African-Americans as coons, picaninnies, mammies, or sex-crazed lunatics dominated the national and global imagination for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, having emerged from the psychosis of slavery to become the hallmark of minstrel shows in the early 1800s. Later they were most notably popularized by Topsy, a character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The novel was written in opposition to slavery but ultimately served as a catalyst for further black caricatures in books like “The Story of Little Black Sambo” and Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Niggers,” later published as “Ten Little Indians” for American audiences.