Hanover, Pennsylvania Sept. 21, 1908 – It is reported that a William White, a Negro, found close to death at a carnival in this city today and taken to the hospital where he is not expected to survive. White is not known to anyone in the area and was working at the Hanover Fair in the “Hit the Coon” game.
As readers may know this is a variation of the well-known “African Dodger” game that is played at many carnivals and circus concourses. It is also known by the degrading name “Hit the Nigger Baby”
Mr. White happened to be the target this unfortunate day. A traveling baseball club with five pitchers paid and took their shots. White was hit by what must of seemed an unending streak as 25 balls hit him before he collapsed and the box manager stopped the proceedings.
While it seems, unlikely White survived this incident, we don't know. There is no follow up story in any paper of the day, and one could say that, that story wouldn’t be new-worthy. A transient Black man living in 1908 just isn’t something you would likely read.
Injury or even death wasn’t uncommon for this game that seemed quite popular between 1880 and 1920. It was often the most mentioned attraction in carnival ads of the period and even as part of high school fairs or community fund raisers.
Mr. White wasn’t the first man injured in the barbaric carnival game. In Boston in 1904 Joe Hunt was discussing how a man threw a ball when someone else struck him with a ball causing him to collapse and injured his eye. Also, in 1904 Albert Johnson in New York City was struck so hard they had to amputate his nose. Also, in 1904 a man named London Thompson had his skull fractured when the game player threw coal rather than the baseballs.
There is no exact historical record of deaths and injuries. Yet must have been significant as the New York Age one of the most prominent Black newspapers in the country called for the banning of the game with live targets in 1915 and even encouraged a bill in the New York legislature, which did pass banning the game within the state.
Slowly perceptions changed and people realized just how brutal and cruel the game was, and the live versions of the game were replaced. Sometimes with variants that used African heads carved from wood or soap or offensive caricatures. Even this was outlawed in Massachusetts where the law “prohibited ridicule and disgrace any member of any race, sect, color or religion. “
By this time though the demeaning “African Dodger” term had become part of pop culture. It was referred to sports stories, books, even mews paper comics. This line from a 1930 story about the Philadelphia Phillies versus the Boston Braves in 1930, “Claude Willoughby got hit more than the side show African Dodger”.
In other places the game was replaced by the variation “Dip the African" where the carnival worker was placed above a tank of water, a dunking game that still exists. However while this was demonstrably safer it still remained a racist game dehumanizing the Black individual. Although the idea was to no longer beat someone to death it was still to embarrass them. Whether it was the “African Dip “or the target games with representations it still involved harming a Negro and keeping the class hierarchy in place. Treating Blacks as targets in games reinforced that they were worthless and at the bottom of society’s ladder.
As society turned with the great migration and more Blacks became part of the culture of Northern cities and early Civil Rights indicatives began the tenor of carnival gamed changed. This wasn’t fast or based on changing laws like it had been in the teens but the image of clowns began replacing Black men in carnival games. This took a few decades but by 1960 “African Dodger” was a remnant of the past.
Sources:
Was a Violently Racist Carnival Game Once Popular in America? By Dan McGuill, Snopes.com February 26, 2018
From Hostility to Reverence: 100 years of African American imagery in Games – The Jim Crow Museum Ferris State University
America’s Grotesque History of Racist Games by Deante Morgan, 2015 NAACP.org
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