In the darkest era of racial segregation, hunters rented black children and used them as live bait to attract crocodiles.
Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the crocodile skin it was particularly popular in the United States where it was widely used to make shoes, bags and belts.
Capturing an alligator however, it was not a risk-free activity and there were many cases of hunters losing an arm, a leg or sustaining other injuries while hunting.
In Florida the hunters had a gruesome idea: rent black babies to use as live bait for crocodiles.
It sounds unbelievable, but during slavery and under the Jim Crow laws, which were only repealed in 1965, in the United States African Americans were brutalized and mistreated in every conceivable way.
African Americans were indeed considered as "sub-humans" and represented as wild and worthless creatures.
If there was a way to enslave, torture, oppress or kill a black person, it was almost certainly put into practice, however brutal it was.
In this terrible context, among the so many atrocities committed by whites against blacks at that time, there was also that of using children to hunt crocodiles.
The Jim Crow Museum, in Michigan, collects objects related to the oppressive racial discrimination of blacks, including a photograph of the time showing nine black children, without clothes, whose legend reads "Alligator Bait", that is "bait for crocodile".
In the darkest age of racial segregation, the hunters hired the children from families in exchange for two dollars, to throw them into the water in order to attract crocodiles.
From the newspaper articles of the time, the supporters of this tremendous initiative declared that there was nothing terrible in using children as bait, which came out of the water only a little wet but amused ready to be returned safely to their mothers.
Black-skinned children were also used by zookeepers to help move alligators to park areas. In 1908 the Washington Times reported that a keeper of the New York Zoological Garden lured alligators out of their winter shelter, using pickaninnies, a derogatory term referring to children of color.
Although it was not a widespread practice, that of use children as bait for crocodiles it was however a fairly common practice, so much so that the term "alligator bait" was also used as an insult to African Americans.
What can I say, really one dark page in the history of Florida and humanity.
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Tatiana Maselli
