The History Of Racist Carnival Games Like ‘African Dodger’ — Which Evolved Into The Dunk Tanks Still Used Today

The History Of Racist Carnival Games Like ‘African Dodger’ — Which Evolved Into The Dunk Tanks Still Used Today

For decades, dunk tanks have been fixtures of the American carnival. This popular game requires either a volunteer patron or a carnival worker to sit on a seat suspended above a tank of water.

Patrons then pay to throw projectiles at a target — and if they hit it, the person in the seat will fall into the water. And though the dunk tank seems perfectly innocent, its real history is much darker than most people realize.⁠

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Up until the 1950s, a game called African Dodger invited patrons to throw baseballs, eggs, and rocks at the heads of Black men in order to win prizes. Over time, African Dodger evolved into African Dip, which is nearly identical to the dunk tank games beloved by many Americans to this day. 

Visit the link in our profile to learn more about the horrific history of African Dodger, the racist "game" that was once a hallmark of American carnivals.⁠

From the 1880s through the 1950s, white carnival-goers would throw baseballs, eggs, and other objects at the heads of Black men in a game known as "African Dodger."

Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and/or images of violent, disturbing, or otherwise potentially distressing events.

The carnival is in many ways a hallmark of American culture, a symbol of summertime entertainment and simple amusements: games, ferris wheels, funnel cakes, and corn dogs. Of course, like many things taken for granted, carnivals weren’t always innocent events.

Take, for example, the freakshow, which now serves primarily as fodder for horror movies but once was a very real horror for the people who were dubbed “freaks” and put on display for people to mock.

Performing animals didn’t fair any better, often subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment for the sake of entertainment — and for those who weren’t white, carnivals were often a public display of racist mockery more than anything else.

African Dodger, The Carnival Game Where People Threw Baseballs At Black Men

The game of African Dodger was perhaps one of the most brutal mainstream carnival activities to prominently feature racist vitriol — and “African Dodger” was one of the least offensive names for it, with other names sometimes blatantly featuring racial slurs.

The game had a simple premise: Throw something at a target, hit it, and win a prize. Except in this game, the target was a human. Carnivals employed Black men to stand behind a backdrop with their heads exposed to take the hits.

Carnival patrons paid money for a certain number of projectiles — sometimes rocks, other times eggs, but baseballs were a popular choice.

As you can imagine, the men suffered numerous horrible injuries from the “game.” Below are just a few reports archived by the Jim Crow Museum. As a warning, these accounts are difficult to read.

In 1904, the Meriden Daily Journal reported that one Black carnival employee named Albert Johnson worked as a dodger, and avoided “fifty or sixty cents” worth of balls thrown at him by a man named “Cannon Ball” Gillen of the Clifton Athletic Club — a professional baseball player. However, one of Gillen’s balls finally struck Johnson, and the damage was so severe that the Journal wrote it would “probably be necessary to amputate the nose in order to save Johnson’s life.”

Elsewhere, in Connecticut, a Black man named Walter Smith was struck so hard in the face that several of his teeth were knocked out. Reportedly, the baseball was lodged so tightly in his mouth that it had to be cut apart for removal.

In Hanover, Pennsylvania, William White was assaulted by a team of baseball players who brought their own heavy balls and hit him nearly every time. A reporter at the time noted that White “was pretty well used-up” by the end of it. White suffered a number of internal injuries that could have been fatal.

On Sept. 11, 1924, an advertisement in the Providence News asked the question, “Do you want to earn a few precious dollars on the evening of September 19 and 20?” The ad goes on to encourage “lion-hearted and hard-headed” young men to apply for a job as a dodger, with the promise that they would be treated fairly and “reach the Rhode Island Hospital safely in the event that that [sic] one of the baseballs comes in contact with your head.”

The ad even mentions that the week prior, “an African dodger was killed in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the week before a dodger was killed in Hackensack, but don’t permit these deaths to influence you.”

Clearly, carnival owners knew the risks of the game, but they didn’t care enough about the lives of their Black employees to put an end to it. On top of that, cartoons, advertisements, and signs often portrayed the dodgers as smiling, implying that they were more than happy to suffer the pain.

And for only $.69, those who couldn’t make it to the fair — or those who were particularly fond of African Dodger — could buy the at-home version of the game. This version also featured a smiling Black man and the words, “Hit the Dodger! Knock Him Out!”

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