The African American Museum of Iowa is a statewide museum dedicated to preserving, exhibiting, and teaching Iowa’s African American history. As Iowa’s leading educational resource on the topic, we educate more than 30,000 people each year through museum tours, traveling exhibits, research services, youth and adult education programs, and community and fundraising events.
This fall, the museum opened a temporary exhibit titled Racist Things: Hateful Imagery in the American Home. This exhibit thoughtfully considers the impact of post Civil War society and the culture surrounding Jim Crow laws as the basis of the popularity of dehumanizing Black imagery. While this imagery was pervasive in all forms of pop culture and mass media, much of this imagery manifested itself in the American home. From salt and pepper shakers to lawn ornaments, objects of racism were accepted for decades in homes across America. These objects were a form of propaganda that created an acceptance of intolerance and injustice of the Black community for a century. The attitudes and acceptance of these biases continue to form social and cultural inequality and intolerance to this day.