Some of my friends told me that it was a common thing in the South to sell black infants as fishing bait, specifically to catch alligators. They say there is a lot of memorabilia and other evidence to prove it, but all they tell me is they found this “on the internet.” I just find it hard to believe, because it seems economically inefficient. It’s so shocking that it seems like clickbait, so I was hoping to find more back up for it if it existed.
I did some digging on this a few years ago, and was unable to turn up any evidence of the practice. Whilst slavery was an incredibly violent and dehumanising institution, this particularly abuse seems to have been one needlessly invented to create additional suffering where there was already far, far too much for us to talk about.