Note: I mean no offence by the term Black. I am simply seeking to place the book in its historical context. It is my understanding that this is the currently accepted terminology.
Imagine, you are a young child and it is the 1950s. It's Christmas and you have nearly finished opening your gifts. You have been given lots of lovely new things, but you particularly like your new book -Ten Little Nigger Boys. It is only a small book, but it has such cute little pictures with funny looking little children. Of course you already know the rhyme, everybody knows it, but the book is just so cute!
When I took this American book to show the children they were stunned by it. The blantant racism in the title and the funny representations of Black children are so far out of their realm of experience that this book was fascinating, if slightly horrifying. Today, words like nigger are so derogatory that the children wouldn't even think of using them and the old rhymes which included words like nigger have been forgotten or altered. Even the Gollywog biscuits which I remember from when I was small have been renamed. The fact that books like this existed, were written for children and were based on popular, well know rhymes and characters was for the children simply amazing and, as one child said, really depressing. They didn't even realise that racism in this form not only existed but was considered acceptable, even being 'taught' to children through their toys and books.
The children shown in the book 'Ten little Nigger Boys' are very common representations of Black children at the time.The pictures caricature Black children as small 'coons', which was the term used for caricatures of Black adults. Such small coons were known as picanniny's or gollywogs. The first representation of a child in this way was actually in a famous anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this novel, Topsy is a slave girl with dirty, ragged clothes, kinky, disarrayed hair and a child-like innocence and wonder. She was meant to be a tragic figure, showing the evils of slavery but it wasn't long after the novels publication that Topsy began to appear on stage as a happy, cheerful character, revelling in her misfortunes and entertaining the audience as a comic character.
Picanniny's were also some of the first 'stars' of motion pictures, even before movies were actually created. In 1893, when Edison was experimenting with camera effects, he photographed several Black children running and playing and later showed these photographs using his other inventions, the kinetoscope and kinetograph. This allowed the pictures to 'move'. Countless other representations of picanniny children were created, right through the history of motion picture, including in movies.
Depictions of Black children as picanninys went on to be used in books, like the one I showed the children and the famous Little Black Sambo, on advertising, postcards, and they were even sometimes used in schools! Often picanninys were shown with animals, or doing things often associated with animals, like climbing trees. They were also often being chased (like in the book I showed the children), and were usually shown as gluttons, always running towards food. Indeed, the book I showed the children shows the children eating apples, in a tree, being caught by a farmers dog and chased away - a very typical story. Sometimes the children are even eaten by animals, or killed - not at all nice! If you would like to learn more about the way Black children were portrayed, click here.