The watermelon stereotype is an anti-Black racist trope originating in the Southern United States. It first arose as a backlash against African American emancipation and economic self-sufficiency in the late 1860s.
After the American Civil War, in several areas of the south, former slaves grew watermelon on their own land as a cash crop to sell. Thus, for African Americans, watermelons were a symbol of liberation and self-reliance. But for many in the majority white culture watermelons embodied, and threatened, a loss of dominance. Southern White resentment against African Americans led to a politically potent cultural caricature, using the watermelon to disparage African Americans as childish and unclean, among other negative attributes.[1]