This haul stretches across early 90’s and 2000’s cultural production, each piece carrying its own story about representation, ownership, and how meaning shifts over time.
Early or mid 90’s unworn gollywog ringer tee, probably produced for international markets where American racist imagery was often reframed as “heritage Americana.” The gollywog itself comes from colonial and minstrel caricature traditions, but what becomes especially interesting is how places like Japan and parts of Europe reproduced these motifs decades later, often detached from the violence and racial context they originally carried. Objects like this raise complicated questions, who decides what becomes collectible, what happens when harmful imagery becomes aestheticized through distance, and how do we archive responsibly without erasing the truth behind it.
90s era Black Nativity sweatshirt tied to the National Center of Afro American Artists, a reminder of how Black institutions created their own spaces for storytelling, spirituality, and performance when access to mainstream platforms was limited. The imagery almost reads like a baptism, the silhouette of a Black figure dressed in white carries a sense of ritual and rebirth, suggesting that even within a creative arts movement or promotional garment there is something sacred about gatekeeping Blackness and maintaining its independence.
2000’s Def Poetry Jam tee, documenting the bridge between spoken word, hip hop, and televised cultural expression, proof that poetry, street language, and performance have always been foundational to how we communicate and resist. One of the standout moments for me was Black Ice’s performance of “Truth Is,” a powerful reminder of how spoken word carried truth, urgency, and cultural reflection in real time.
DM if interested
Home Boy Hair Cut Barber Sign
Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire
Enamel / oil on pressed board
Date: c. 1990s
Approx. 18 x 36 in.
(45.7 x 91.4 cm)
A hand painted barbershop sign depicting contemporary Black hairstyles influenced by hip-hop culture, American sportswear branding, and diasporic beauty aesthetics. Created by local sign painters, these works served as functional street-level advertising and now stand as important visual records of global Black style and community identity.
The rise of Photoshop, digital templates, and mass-printed promotional materials has reduced the presence of hand rendered community-centered art. These works are therefore not only aesthetic, but evidence of a visual economy that once relied on independent craft, skill, and neighborhood circulation.
The barbershop has always been an archive, a site of style, storytelling, and self-definition.
Now part of Eshu Clothing / The Black Folks Antique Show collection.
#HomeBoyHairCut #SportinWaves #LadiesDown #7UpZips #HomeBoy #AmericaPolo
DM for purchase.
Shot by: @philipwpatton
Big thanks to @_mfblu for running with me on this collaboration, and to @philipwpatton for shooting and helping bring the vision together. 💡
This weekend walking through Scott’s Antiques in Atlanta with a friend, I came across two unsettling artifacts from the 1960s tied to the Ku Klux Klan, a Christmas card and a business card. I bought them both for $45, not because they are beautiful or collectible in the traditional sense, but because they are evidence of how organized racial hatred once attempted to normalize itself in everyday American life. A Christmas card, a symbol of family, joy, and religion, printed with the ideology of white supremacy. A business card, something meant to establish trust or commerce, used to identify membership in a terror organization.
Holding these objects I felt fear, hesitation, embarrassment, and also a strange sense of power in claiming them. The dealer told me they came from a family estate where the grandchildren had no idea their grandparents had been involved, which raises a question that lingers with me, how often were objects like this quietly circulating in everyday life then, and how often might they still circulate quietly today?
These items come from the same era as the Civil Rights Movement, not ancient history but within a lifetime many people alive today remember. That means these were not just symbols of hatred, they were tools meant to make hatred appear ordinary.
Looking at them also made me think about the present. In recent years places like Texas have removed hundreds, even thousands, of books from school libraries, many dealing with race, racism, and the Black experience in America. Reports have documented more than 800 books removed in a single year and over 1,700 removals across recent school years in Texas districts. These removals are not officially described as banning African American literature, but many works affected explore slavery, civil rights history, and systemic racism.
Seeing objects like this from the 1960s makes me wonder how the history that explains them could ever be considered unnecessary to teach. Without context artifacts like these are shocking relics, with context they become lessons.
(continued in comments)
I’ve been thinking about two tees that feel connected, even though they come from completely different moments.
One is a vintage 90s Homie the Clown tee. Damon Wayans looking straight at you saying, “Exploit my image on a T-shirt? I don’t think so.” Back then it felt like comedy. Now it feels like commentary. A character warning against exploitation while literally being sold as merchandise. It’s satire living inside capitalism. Then I look at the newer reinterpretation…the Confederate flag burning…and I don’t just see destruction. I see repurposing. Because symbols don’t disappear. They get contested.
The Black Panther Party understood this. When Fred Hampton helped build the Rainbow Coalition, they organized alongside groups like the Young Patriots; poor white Southern migrants whose identities sometimes carried Confederate imagery. That wasn’t endorsement. That was strategy. The Panthers knew that if you want independence in a system that profits off division and the lower class, sometimes you have to engage the contradictions directly. You have to play the game enough to reshape it. That’s where I feel I find these shirts at crossroads.
Homie sits at the intersection of satire and commodification. The Panthers operated at the intersection of ideology and survival inside American capitalism. And now the Confederate flag appears again not as allegiance, but burning and worn under new authorship. The fire doesn’t erase the symbol. It literally transforms it.
What once represented separation and a distorted version of independence gets repurposed into confrontation. Wearing it while it burns feels less like honoring history and more like forcing it to answer to a new narrative.
Maybe independence in America has never meant stepping outside the system. Maybe it means moving through it differently by reclaiming imagery, redirecting meaning, and choosing authorship over ownership.
Maybe independence isn’t about removing the image at all. Maybe it’s about deciding what it means once it’s in your hands.
If interested I’ll see you at the next show or please send a DM 👽
Shirt is also available via @denimtears 📠📠📠
KC BAKING POWDER ADVERTISEMENT, EARLY 20TH CENTURY
This piece was never meant to be a portrait. It was meant to sell.
I found this framed KC Baking Powder advertisement in Norcross, Georgia, through a traveler I connected with on Facebook Marketplace. He had worked on a set years ago, the piece was pulled, never used, and sat in storage until he finally decided to let it go. I was grateful it found its way to me.
By the early 1900s, KC Baking Powder had become a household staple, built through mass advertising, price consistency, and visual reassurance. Like many American brands of the era, it relied on Black imagery to communicate trust and domestic familiarity, while denying Black people humanity, authorship, and ownership. The image shows a Black chef rendered through caricature, positioned as service and reassurance. Blackness became branding. Black bodies became guarantees. Humanism was stripped away to make products feel familiar and safe. This wasn’t representation, it was extraction.
That system didn’t disappear. Today, Black culture is still mined for authenticity, flavor, and credibility while Black life remains disposable. Corporations regularly profit from Black aesthetics while quietly pulling back support for Black ownership and entrepreneurship, as seen in recent backlash toward Target’s shifting commitments to Black business initiatives. In politics, Black faces are often used in campaign imagery, including during Donald Trump’s campaigns, to signal inclusion, even as policies continue to disenfranchise Black communities.
This is the danger of symbolic representation without accountability. Imagery replaces justice. Visibility replaces equity. This object lives in the archive as evidence, not nostalgia, not decoration. To understand the present, we have to sit with the images that shaped it.
There’s a quiet rule in professional sports that still exists today: Be great, but not too expressive. Be human, but not too much. Even now, when athletes are fined or policed for emotion, celebration, or protest, it raises a deeper question:
How do we reclaim space in institutions that were never built for our freedom?
Today, expression in sports feels normal; style, personality, attitude, within limits. But that freedom wasn’t always granted, especially when that expression was too Black.
Before leagues made room for individuality, there were the Harlem Globetrotters.
Founded in 1926 on Chicago’s South Side as the Savoy Big Five, they were an all-Black team playing elite basketball. The name “Harlem” wasn’t geography, it was symbolism. It honored the Harlem Renaissance and signaled Black culture, pride, and global ambition at a time when opportunity was restricted and visibility was controlled.
By the 1930s and ’40s, they blended skill with showmanship, not because they lacked talent, but because creativity was one of the few freedoms available to them. They defeated top white teams, toured internationally, and helped crack the door for Black athletes’ entry into the NBA. Yet Black expression was still policed. I think of Allen Iverson. I think of Ja Morant.
Braids. Tattoos. Locs. Raw honesty. Talent was never the issue. Permission was.
Without the Globetrotters, without Iverson, Craig Hodges , and those who documented Black culture in real time, would Black athletes still be framed as “disrespectful” instead of revolutionary?
Shown here: a vintage Harlem Globetrotters T-shirt (late ’80s / early ’90s), signed by four legendary players, paired with Harlem Globetrotters by George Vecsey (1970).
Blackness didn’t just enter the game. It redefined it.
This is a vintage Ingraham quartz MLK wall clock most likely late ’80s / early ’90s that I found while traveling.
Somewhere along the way it fell. The glass cracked. I almost let it go…but I didn’t.
The clock still works. Still ticks. Still keeps time.
I kept it as a personal item because it feels honest. History doesn’t arrive untouched. It moves, it breaks, it survives.
People often forget how radical Dr. King truly was. Even more radical than what we’re usually taught to imagine. Self-defense was a necessary realization for Black folks, but choosing nonviolence in the face of overwhelming violence was something else entirely. That was unexpected. That was disruptive. That was revolutionary.
To ask people to remain nonviolent while dogs were released, bodies were beaten, and lives were taken, knowing the world was watching, that wasn’t passive. That was strategy. That was sacrifice. That was global pressure before social media ever existed.
This clock still runs.
Time didn’t stop because the glass broke.
And neither did the movement.
Grateful to walk the same streets he once walked.
Grateful to carry reminders like this with intention.
Vintage Super Bowl XXLI tee Chicago Bears vs. Indianapolis Colts XL
We been here before.
Losses, rebuilds, heartbreak seasons… and still, pride.
Being from Chicago, loving the Bears feels like second nature. I don’t question it, mogs just show up. Last night’s playoff loss to the Rams didn’t hurt the way people expect. I felt proud. Proud of those players, proud of the fight, proud of the city that still shows love even when the ending isn’t what we want.
This tee takes me back to a moment that meant everything. Super Bowl XLI with Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy, two Black head coaches meeting on the biggest stage. History made in real time. As a kid, that moment mattered. It shaped how I saw leadership, possibility, and excellence.
And yeah, I was locked in on Devin Hester back then too; speed, confidence, electricity. Chicago always had something special.
Until then, we remember. We archive. We wear the history.
🐻⬇️🖤
#ChicagoBears #SuperBowlXLI #VintageNFL #BlackHistoryInSports #EshuClothing StillProoud
First printed in January 1992, Pictorial Negro League Legends Album was published by R.D. Retort Enterprises and printed by a local commercial printing company in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Compiled by Robert D. Retort, an independent Negro Leagues researcher and collector, the album reflects a period when much of Black baseball history was still being preserved outside major institutions. Produced in a small, likely limited print run and distributed through mail order, community networks, and regional events, copies of this book surface infrequently today. It predates Major League Baseball’s formal recognition of the Negro Leagues (2006) and statistical reclassification (2020), and arrived just after the opening of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (1990), when documentation still relied heavily on grassroots effort. This is not nostalgia, it’s a surviving record of Black memory maintained before institutional validation.
This large format Muhammad Ali portrait was purchased from Nini Barbara Glover, a writer and archivist from the Bronx, who attended Ali’s late career arena exhibition bout against NFL star Lyle Alzado, where Ali outclassed him over eight rounds. The scale, photographic finish, and presentation strongly suggest the portrait was arena sold, meant to be carried home the night of the fight as a witness to the moment (it was according to Nini). Shown alongside it is a 1970s Muhammad Ali “The Champ’s” Premium Shoe Polish tin, an object that reveals how Ali’s image moved beyond the ring and into everyday Black life. While Ali had already been punished for rejecting the name Cassius Clay, embracing Islam, and refusing induction into the Vietnam War, his image was simultaneously embraced by Black communities circulating through arena memorabilia and household goods alike. Together, these objects capture the contradiction of the era: Ali as a commercial icon and Ali as a figure of self-determination, claimed by the people who saw in him the power of choosing oneself in a society that only valued Black bodies when they were profitable.
P.S
Imagine if more of us chose ourselves the way Ali did. Imagine an entire nation of Muhammad Alis building community, refusing exploitation, standing firm. America would panic, disrupt, and resist, just like it always has. But history shows: when people stand long enough, power eventually bends.
#MuhammadAli #TheGreatest #AliLegacy #Eshuarchives eshuclothing
