The History of Crackers

I hope you weren’t expecting to find pictures of the Keebler elves or a box of saltines in this post.  A “conversation” in the comment section of a blog post about the use of racial pejoratives put me in the frame of mind to notice a yard sign in my neighbor’s front garden.

Nothing in my personal history as a multi-racial, self-identified African American from the U.S. North would ever have predicted my current 18-year residence in a place that once had a professional baseball team named The Atlanta Crackers.

In my little world, a cracker, when used to describe a person instead of a salted unleavened biscuit, was a mean, red-faced bigot from the Deep South who talked with a disgusting drawl. He (it seemed always to be a “he”) would prefer that I not exist, and would be more than happy to remedy the fact that I did.

One of the first things I learned about the part of Atlanta I moved into because of a company transfer was the fact that my office was directly across the street from the acreage once home to the “great Atlanta Crackers.”

I was reminded of the shock I experienced when the white man I worked with daily said those words when I saw this on a yard sign on my morning walk.

It was the very first time I had heard the term cracker coming from the mouth of a Caucasian, and I was confused by the off-handed way my partner said it.  Only after I conjured up enough nerve to ask why the team was okay with that name did I learn that the meaning of the term is far from clear, and that everyone recites the etymology that best fits his or her comfort zone.

It turns out the noun cracker has a history that far pre-dates the American South.  Linguists now believe the original root of the word to be the Gaelic craic, which today means “entertaining conversation.”  The anglicized spelling crack was used to refer to a braggart by the English by Elizabethan times, as in Shakespeare’s King John: “What cracker is this…that deafes our ears/ With this abundance of superfluous breath?” [Georgia Encyclopedia]

By the 1760s the English were calling Scots-Irish settlers of the southern American backcountry crackers because they were thought by the English to be great boasters who were “a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia…” [Georgia Encyclopedia]

Over time Southern black people developed a pejorative application of the term to refer to southern whites, but origin of the word remained unclear. One theory holds that the term comes from the common diet of poor whites. From Wikipedia: According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it is a term of contempt for the "poor" or "mean whites," particularly of the U.S. states of Georgia and Florida (see Georgia cracker and Florida cracker). Britannica notes that the term dates back to the American Revolution, and is derived from the cracked corn from which cornmeal and grits, which formed their staple food, are made, as well as corn whiskey.^[2] (In British English "mean" is also a term for tightfistedness.^[3])

A theory that makes more sense to me is that it refers to the white farm hands who worked on plantations who rode on horseback and wielded modified whips to produce a cracking sound and became known as “slave drivers.”  The plantation owners, as well as the slaves, began to call them “Crackers.”

Yet another explanation comes from the cattle industry in Florida.  Because of the dense brush surrounding Florida cattle lands, the cattlemen couldn’t rope them without getting the ropes tangled in the brush, so they used bull whips to herd the cattle instead.  Cattlemen became Crackers there, with no pejorative connotation.  And when South Georgia cattlemen began to drive their herds down into Central Florida’s grassy flatlands to graze, they proudly became Crackers, too.

In Georgia, however, there was something known as a Georgia Cracker. I am told that moniker was given to the original American pioneers who settled in what would become the state of Georgia, probably by the English, which would explain why some native Georgians who are white might describe themselves as Georgia Crackers with a sense of great ancestral pride.

Whichever theory suits you, one thing is certain.  People who were born and raised in Atlanta long enough ago to remember the Atlanta Crackers baseball organization don’t have any problem with its name.

In fact, in 1919 the Atlanta Black Crackers were  founded. They shared the Ponce de Leon ballpark with their white counterparts, the Atlanta Crackers.  And on June 28, 1997, the Atlanta Braves wore 1938 Black Crackers home uniforms and the visiting Philadelphia Phillies wore 1938 Philadelphia Stars road uniforms in a tribute game to the Negro League, which finally disbanded in 1952. [Wikipedia]

 

This Atlanta History Center photo of Ponce de Leon Park  shows the mammoth Sears Roebuck Warehouse in the background.  Almost 2 million square feet in size, this building was sold by Sears to the City of Atlanta in 1991 for $12 million. The City never really did much with it and sold it to developers who just announced a three-year, mixed-use transformation.