It’s hard to say whether these marketing descriptions reference a real tradition, a joke among African Americans or a cruel joke about African Americans (at least one marketing description for a rabbit’s foot used a racist slur). “While other collected versions disagree about exactly when the rabbit must be killed, all indicate that the rabbit's foot historicizes an especially uncanny or evil time: the dark of the moon a Friday a rainy Friday a Friday the Thirteenth.” “A 1908 British account reports rabbits’ feet imported from America being advertised as ‘the left hind foot of a rabbit killed in a country churchyard at midnight, during the dark of the moon, on Friday the 13th of the month, by a cross-eyed, left-handed, red-headed bow-legged Negro riding a white horse,’” he writes. companies that sold rabbits’ feet vouched for their authenticity by claiming that a black person had cut them off under specific, unlucky-seeming conditions.

He explains that in the early 20th century, U.S. One theory is that European Americans appropriated rabbits’ feet from African American customs or jokes they didn’t fully understand, writes Bill Ellis, a professor emeritus of English and American studies at Penn State, in Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. A rabbit's foot is often carried for good luck.

Are rabbit foot lucky