The idea that alligators and other crocodilians lust for non-white flesh—to the point where such people can be used as lures to bring the reptiles under the hunter’s guns—had a global appeal, with the identities of the babies in question swapped to fit different circumstances. In 1894, Ohio’s Mansfield Daily Shield ran a lengthy and wretched piece on an anonymous British former army officer, who claimed that he’d shot 100 crocodiles by repeatedly employing the same "Hindoo infant" as bait; three years earlier, the Toronto Daily Mail had run a story about the stolen children of Russian Jews being used to lure in Nile crocodiles from Egypt. Writers inserted the folktale wholesale into unrelated incidents, such as a 1908 Washington Times piece that spiced up an account of Bronx Zoo keepers moving alligators with allegations that they—“knowing as [the keepers] did their epicurean fondness for the black man”—lured the reptiles along with the aid of "plump little Africans."
Whether or not this ever happened is a subject of some debate. The Jim Crow Museum maintains that it did, if rarely; Snopes, kicking the tires on the more prominent stories, suggests it probably didn’t. Certainly it was something later southern writers were eager to laugh off. In 1968, baseball pitcher Bob Gibson recalled being heckled with “gator bait” stories during his time in Columbus, Georgia. Clearly stung—and thumbing his suspenders with every word—the sports editor of Columbus’ newspaper fired back, wondering how Gibson could be "naive enough to fall for such a fantastic tale,” one that had to be “tongue-in-cheek.”
Gibson, of course, wasn’t falling for anything. That this bit of racist invective was not a literal threat does not mean that it wasn’t a serious one: it’s hard to laugh off a joke when the punchline is your disposability. And as folklorist Patricia Turner writes in her 2002 book Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies, it was a joke that white southerners simply delighted in making. Among several too flatly racist to repeat, Turner records one where Lyndon Baines Johnson’s helicopter stops over in Louisiana to award a medal for integration to two white men pulling a black man on water skis through a swamp. After LBJ leaves, the two white men glance at each other, baffled. “Who in the shit was that?” “I don’t know, but he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about catching alligators.”