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Real photo postcard (RPPC) postmarked Shobonier, Ill., December 1908, staging a tongue-in-cheek reenactment of President Theodore Roosevelt's White House dinner with Booker T. Washington. Two unidentified men sit at a cloth-covered table set with beer and soda bottles in a wallpapered room with a framed landscape and a Champion poster: a white man in a cap at left and a Black man at right. Measures about 4.8 x 3.5 inches. Condition: staining, foxing, toning, creases, a clipped top right corner and a torn stamp; please see photos.
The pencil message on the back reads: "Kind friend: This picture represents Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington dinning together ha ha. H.M." It is addressed to Miss ... Emerson, Shobonier, Ill.
Roosevelt's October 1901 invitation of Washington to dine at the White House drew a furious reaction across the segregated South and stayed a national talking point for years. This card shows that event still being joked about in a small Illinois town seven years later, a candid document of early 20th century racial attitudes and political humor.
Of interest to collectors of Black Americana, Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington material, political history and small-town Illinois real photo postcards.
