Apart from crocodilians and babies, the common threads running through all these reports are racism, xenophobia, and the utter lack of specifics. If we take them seriously, we have no choice but to conclude that using human infants as alligator bait was incredibly widespread at some point in time; yet, we have not encountered a single report that included enough detail to verify that even one such incident actually took place. They're just tales.
We are unable to prove the negative, of course. We cannot demonstrate that no infant anywhere, irrespective of color or creed, was ever used as reptile bait. But neither has anyone proved to date that infants were, in fact, used in such a manner.
We checked this conclusion with folklorist and African American studies professor Patricia Turner, who has probably done more research on the "alligator bait" motif than anyone else in the world, and asked her if she had ever come across information suggesting that the phenomenon might be real. "I have not seen any evidence to suggest that it was true," she said, adding that it would have been all the more unlikely during the era of slavery, when a black child would have been a much more valuable commodity than an alligator.
Regardless, it is true that the notion that dark-skinned children were the favorite food of alligators and crocodiles, like so many other demeaning stereotypes about people of African descent, was already commonplace in the antebellum United States ("...they prefer the flesh of a negro to any other delicacy,"
Fraser's Magazine reported as a scientific fact in 1850). It's therefore plausible to suppose that the epithet "alligator bait" did not follow from, but rather preceded the existence of stories depicting black children as such, which would relegate those stories to mere folklore.
