A slave collar. A branding iron. A Ku Klux Klan uniform. Lynching ropes.
For decades, Forgotten Images founders Sharon and David McLucas have traveled across the country to gather artifacts from African American history for their collection.
A portion of the Forgotten Images collection will be on display until Sunday, March 6 for the Museum of Latin American Arts’ Afro-Latinx Festival.
“A lot of people say, ‘It’s too emotional, very sensitive. We’re not living in those times anymore. We need to forget.’ But to me, because young people have never been exposed to it, I say it’s about progression, not regression,” co-founder and Long Beach resident Sharon McLucas said. “I want people to be conscious of it. I don’t want them to forget.”
The two founders have gathered over 20,000 artifacts for the collection—which spans two centuries of the African American experience and has won a letter of recommendation from the Smithsonian Museum.
It includes baskets used by enslaved women to carry their children in the cotton fields, original Aunt Jemima memorabilia, a 500-pound bale of cotton, toys depicting racist minstrel caricatures in blackface and a replica 1798 cotton gin, among other items.
David first started collecting artifacts when he came across a blackfaced, cast-iron piggy bank at a flea market, which he learned was called a n****r bank.
“I didn’t realize they had things like that out there,” he said, explaining that he purchased the bank and later bought a book about Black Americana to learn more about the item.
He explained that Black people were used as marketing tools for various brands, especially personal care products as Black people were considered “a dirty image.” During the same century that brands were co-opting Black personas to push their products, Black babies were termed “alligator bait.”
Sharon said she’s always been interested in history. Her mother was former President Bill Clinton’s nanny in Hope, Arkansas, she said, and they would often visit the town.
“I always have migrated towards older people, because there were never any girls to really play with,” she said. “So I would just sit around and listen to their stories and listen to them reminisce.”
Forgotten Images began when the two married in 1992 and combined Sharon’s collection of salt and pepper shakers and historical photographs with David’s collection of music.
“We just started combining our resources and buying music albums, slave shackles, all kinds of things,” Sharon said. “Things that should not be forgotten and aren’t taught in school.”
Last year they took a three-week road trip and visited nine different states in search of items for their collection. Even when they’re on vacation, they’re always on the lookout for new artifacts, she said.
“A lot of people, what they consider trash, I consider a treasure,” she said.
The collection includes items from as far back as 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia.
Forgotten Images doesn’t merely include items of trauma from the African American experience. It also includes Black films, literature, music and magazines with famous African Americans on their covers.
But the core of the collection parallels its name “Forgotten Images”—items and artifacts that are often forgotten from the oppressive and often suppressed history of Black people in America.
A few years back, the two found a lichen-coated, 200-pound plantation bell in Louisiana, which was used like a clock to tell enslaved Africans and African Americans when it was time to get up in the morning, time to eat, or time to go to the cotton fields.
The working plantation bell is typically the last item in the tour of the Forgotten Images collection, David said.
“We actually use it for a positive image,” David said. “We allow our tour group to come up and honor somebody that was special in their family or somebody that is special in their life.”
He said ringing the bell is emotional for many people. David said that toddlers, middle school, high school and college students have rung the bell in someone’s honor, but that older folks often use the opportunity to tell their stories.
David recently showed a portion of the exhibit at Jordan High School, including a slave collar engraved with the words, “We have fine horses and n*****s. Columbus, Georgia 1857.”
Unlike typical museum exhibitions, the two allow visitors to interact with their items, to “feel the burden, the trauma of wearing shackles,” David said.
“A lot of times when [young people] see our exhibit, they see these images and don’t realize that these images are them, and they’re laughing at them,” he said. “But by the time they get through with the tour, they’re not laughing.”
The Museum of Latin American Art’s 2022 Afro-Latinx Festival began on Feb. 21. The Forgotten Images exhibit will be on display from Feb. 27 to March 6 at the museum, located at 628 Alamitos Ave.
Admission to the museum is $10 for adults, $7 for students with a valid ID, $7 for seniors and free for children under 12 years old and MOLAA members. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free to the public on Sundays.