A darktown law suit-part first: Cheerful Milker-De plaintiff has de head and de defendant de tail but i git de cream all de time"" – Vintage Print
![A darktown law suit-part first: Cheerful Milker-De plaintiff has de head and de defendant de tail but i git de cream all de time"", [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1886. — antique lithograph](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/b5/b5ef1d39577f-L.webp)
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this antique lithograph of A darktown law suit-part first: Cheerful Milker-De plaintiff has de head and de defendant de tail but i git de cream all de time"". An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
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A darktown law suit-part first: Cheerful Milker-De plaintiff has de head and de defendant de tail but i git de cream all de time""
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The caption's joke turns on a cow in a lawsuit where the plaintiff gets the head, the defendant gets the tail, and the milker gets the cream. Published in 1886 by the New York firm Currier & Ives, it belongs to the Darktown series of comic lithographs from the 1880s, which drew on minstrel-show stereotypes to portray Black Americans as foolish and lawless. The phonetic dialect in the title is part of that design, and the humor depends on viewers already sharing those assumptions. Today the print is most useful as evidence of how racist popular imagery was made and circulated.
| Created / published | [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1886. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph. |
| Genre | c1983 |
| Notes | Caricature issued as part of the Darktown comics" series. Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,078 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-174325 |
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