This postcard features an illustration of a black girl in the form of a racist caricature called a picaninny. The picaninny was the dominant racist stereotype of black children in the United States from the 1850s through the 1970s, including Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Farina from Our Gang, or the Little Rascals. Robert Gallagher, a U.S. Army soldier on active duty at Camp Robinson, Arkansas, sent this postcard to his wife in Leavenworth, Kansas, during World War II. The routine nature of Gallagher's note on the back of the postcard--he does not refer to the illustration on the front, but comments on the weather, promises to write more and asks if his wife and baby are well--underscores just how common racist images of black Americans were in the 20th century.
Kansas Memory
Kansas Historical Society
Postcard from Robert Gallagher to Mrs. Robert Gallagher - front