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This article explicates the origins of the racist watermelon trope and its relationship to white Americans' attitudes toward emancipation. The trope had antecedents in Orientalist depictions of the growing, selling, and eating of watermelons, but the fruit was not associated with African Americans until after emancipation. Freedpeople used watermelons to enact and celebrate their freedom, especially their newfound property rights. This provoked a backlash among white Americans, who then made the fruit a symbol of African Americans' supposed uncleanliness, childishness, idleness, and unfitness for the public square. The trope spread in U.S. print culture throughout the late 1860s and supported the post-emancipation argument that African Americans were unsuited for citizenship.
Children are fickle. Henry Evans missed his nanny, Clara, and cried for days when she left, but he also hated her for leaving now that his family no longer owned her. So when he and his former nanny crossed paths in the streets of Houston in the summer of 1865 and she offered him a watermelon, he told her that "he would not eat what free negroes ate" and walked away.1 In such exchanges as these, the stereotype that African Americans were overly fond of watermelon was born. The stereotype has prevailed even into the twenty-first century; for example, a mayor in Orange County, California, angered many people and ultimately resigned after forwarding an email that mocked Barack Obama's recent inauguration with an image of the White House lawn planted with watermelons.2 The stereotype has been around for so long, and its origins have remained so obscure, that many people think the stereotype simply appeared out of thin air. An exasperated user of the online bulletin board Reddit wrote, "Nobody knows why watermelons are a racist fruit, they just are," a sentiment that encourages some white Americans to dismiss the trope's power altogether and accuse African Americans of being overly sensitive.3 But the watermelon stereotype has a past. It emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. White southerners created the racist trope after emancipation in direct response to freedpeople's actions.4 Freedpeople grew watermelons on their own land, ate them to celebrate their freedom, and sold them in the public square; in short, they used watermelons in ways that signified...