Here are a few captured images which I just uploaded.
They range from 1892 to 1950 and all depict blacks and bicycles.
I definitely find the first (earliest) two quite derogatory and offensive.
But, then we lapse into the fanciful popular imagination, and the last two were clearly intended to actually SELL bikes - something which would have been a bad idea if the people depicted were to be viewed in a thoroughly demeaning manner.
1892 - Currier & Ives print:
http://www.flickr.com/
1900-1910 postcard:
http://www.flickr.com/
1920s-1930s KTEMA bike poster:
http://www.flickr.com/
1950 TERROT bike poster:
http://www.flickr.com/
Aunt Jemima as depicted on US pancake batter and syrup packaging has undergone a considerable make-over since I was a child in the 1950s. She now appears more sophisticated and seems just warmly maternal, whereas many decades ago her attire evoked thoughts of the era of slavery in the US. Even to my young mind, I thought it was an insulting image... but, I was a northern Yankee boy raised in Connecticut.
Time period and even location can make a difference. But, content and intention is the determining factor when we gaze back in time. It is all too easy to insert our own current perceptions to an earlier cultural mindset - however naive or offensive it may have been.
Living in the Southwestern US, I now also know many Native American Indians. Contrary to the TV ads of the 1970s, I have never seen one shed a tear at the sight of litter tossed on the roadside.
BOB HANSON, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO, USA