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There are many stories told in the Jim Crow Museum, but none are as horrible as these tales. The idea of using the skins of black people to make purses, shoes, belts, and other products is, of course, disgusting to contemporary Americans; however, there was a time—not so long ago—when the debasement of black Americans was so nearly complete that one could read about the skin of a black person being tanned in the same newspaper that reported the previous day’s baseball box scores.