Knoxville News Sentinel Cover Image

This media image comes from the Knoxville News Sentinel. It is supposed to be about the football game between number one ranked Tennessee Volunteers and the number two ranked Florida State Seminoles.
This image depicts a train, being driven by a white Tennessee Volunteer, plowing over a Native American Florida State Seminole. The Seminole is drawn with very exaggerated features, looking almost dumb with its tongue hanging out of his mouth. What the Seminole says is just poking fun of how Native Americans were thought to have talked. The English came to their country and just expected Native Americans to conform and speak perfect English, when they had their own language. The white man driving the train says they are going to paint the desert orange, meaning that they were going to take over the desert, which was the Native Americans land. On the bottom of the image, there is a cog driving a car, the car is smashing through a fence, and through a sign that says “new and improved Trail of Tears.” I took this to mean that the thoughts of what happened to Native Americans around the time of the Trail of Tears is not out of people’s heads, that these racial thoughts are still thought about. Another sentence on the image says, “O, give me land, lots o’ land, full of starry skies above…” This quote shows exactly the feelings of white Americans during this period of time. Whites wanted land, lots of land, and they would do whatever it took to get land, no matter if it meant killing or displacing others, whose land it was to begin with. As Zinn talked about in the chapter, “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress,” Native Americans were displaced and put through inhuman treatment since Columbus arrived in the New World.
Why would this image be drawn, when it many think that this racism is a thing of the past? By Florida State having the name the Seminoles, only adds to the racial slurs and thoughts that come to people’s minds. The Seminoles are an actual Native American tribe, and when this image was published, it outraged their people. There is another statement in the image, “Don’t worry, folks…he’s not a full-blooded Indian…he’s just a SEMI-nole.” This is another very derogatory and racist statement that outraged the Seminole and Native American population. This image is a bold statement about those historical events, and show that these racist thoughts are still around.
I could not believe that this image was actually published in a circulated news source. Even though at first glance it is supposed to be poking fun at the upcoming football game between the number one and number two ranked schools, one can see that it goes a lot deeper than just a football game.