Even before she hit the bigtime as a part of The Pointer Sisters, Anita Pointer was already into antiques. She and her sisters June, Ruth, and Bonnie wore vintage clothing from the ‘40s onstage. Anita Pointer stills sings, but she’s also a serious collector of black memorabilia. The objects in her collection would cover a basketball court, by her estimation. These include slave artifacts, celebrity souvenirs, and racist caricatures of the Jim Crow era.
Pointer: I’ve always loved antiques, even as a little girl. My grandmother and my great-grandmother kept these trunks full of old clothes in the garage. Me and my sister Ruth used to play in those old clothes, putting them on and walking around the neighborhood. People would laugh at us, but we didn’t care. We’d be clonking down the street in old high-heeled shoes. It was so funny. I just love the memories of old things, so I guess it was a natural evolution for me to get into collecting. But as a child, I never saw any of the black memorabilia that I’m collecting now. Those racist caricatures weren’t in our home.
I suppose white people made these caricatures for themselves—to laugh at them, I guess. I first discovered black memorabilia in 1998. That year, I was being inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, in Little Rock, Arkansas. They gave me an award for my contribution to music and had a big to-do for it, where I met Governor Mike Huckabee. After the ceremony, we were headed to Prescott, Arkansas, where my momma’s from, and we saw an antiques store. I’ve always loved looking around antiques stores, so we stopped. That’s when I saw Dancing Sam, the first piece of black memorabilia that I bought. He was a painted black wooden doll, with a wire holder on his back and little hinges on his limbs. You hold him on top of a plywood platform, and you tap the plywood so he jumps and dances around. The packaging says, “Hours and hours of fun for your children.” [Laughs.] I was like, “Whoa, you mean kids would sit there and play with this for hours?” Dancing Sam was black with white lips, like blackface makeup, so he intrigued me. It all started there. I began going to antiques stores and picking up black memorabilia wherever I could find it.
Caricatures like these are shameful artifacts of our past, which Pointer believes are worth preserving to remind us of how things were. Collectors Weekly interviewed Anita Pointer about her childhood, her Civil Rights activities, her singing career, and her collection of black memorabilia.
(Image credit: Roxie Mckain and Jacinta Dellinger)
There was some horribly racist stuff, but it's a part of history. And how do you know where you're going, if you don't know where you've been?