Source: Palm Beach Post
by Mark V Barrow, Jr.
“The migrant detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz is closed, but much about it remains unresolved. There are lawsuits over detainees’ treatment, environmental claims over damage to protected wetlands and uncertainty about the future of the airstrip it was built on. One aspect of the facility has drawn far less attention, though ― the name itself, and the long history of associating alligators with racist ideas about people of color. … As early as the 18th century, French explorers and naturalists began claiming that alligators and crocodiles showed a preference for attacking and consuming people of African descent. Plantation owners in the South eagerly repeated these stories because they discouraged enslaved people from escaping into marshes and swamps, where pursuing them proved difficult. The idea gained much wider traction after the Civil War.” (08/20/26)