A Twitter user Abayomi with username @iamabayorr wrote a thread where she wrote about the gut-wrenching history of black babies used as bait for Crocodiles/alligators. Here is the thread

Alligator hunting was very profitable in the 1800-1900’s. The skin was used to make shoes, bags, belts and other items.However, white hunters often lost their arms and sometimes their lives as they attempting to attract alligators to the Surface so they decided to use ‘bait’. Little black children were used as bait to catch alligators. Some say it was done by white men during slave times in Florida and Louisiana and other parts of the American South.

Here is the most complete account of how it was done, coming from the grandson of someone who says he used to do it:The slaves who had babies they would steal the babies during the course of the day, some times when their mothers weren’t watching. He said they would grab these children and take them down to the swamp, and sometime leave them in pens like little chicken coops. They would go down there at night, take these babies and tie them up, put a rope around their neck and around their torso and tie it tight. He said when they would throw the babies in tied to this rope and in a matter of minutes, the alligator were on them. He said the alligator would clamp his jaws on the child and once he clamped on them you couldn’t see anything but the rope.

“Baits Alligators with Pickaninnies,” reads a Washington Times headline on June 3, 1908. The article continues, “Zoo Specimens Coaxed to Summer Quarters by Plump Little Africans.” The New York Zoological Gardens’ zookeeper sent two black children into an enclosure that housed more than 25 crocodiles and alligators. The children were chased by the hungry reptiles, entertaining zoo patrons while leading the alligators and crocodiles out of the reptile house, where they spent the winter, into a tank where they could be viewed during the summer. According to the newspaper article, “two small colored children happened to drift through the reptile house.” The zookeeper “pressed them into service.” He believed that alligators and crocodiles had an “epicurean fondness for the black man.” He also believed, along with all the people who allowed it to happen, that the lives of those sons were nearly valueless.

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