They are demeaning relics of a racist past and no amount of "whitesplaining/whitewashing" is going to change that. Every few years though, this story gets recycled. I've no idea why. Or maybe I do, and I prefer to not think about it....
http://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/july08/index.htm
I have heard this account from many African Americans and it is frequently cited on Internet sites. It is a heroic tale and, like many such tales, its historical accuracy is questionable. In a 1987 letter to the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Ellen McCallister Clark, a Mount Vernon librarian, concluded that "the story is apocryphal; conveying a message about heroism among blacks during the Revolutionary War and General Washington's humanitarian concerns, but it is not based on an actual incident. Neither a person by the name of Jocko Graves, nor the account of any person freezing to death while holding Washington's horses has been found in any of the extensive records of the period. Likewise, the Mount Vernon estate was inventoried and described by a multitude of visitors over the years and there has never been any indication of anything resembling a 'jockey' statue on the grounds. I have put the story in the category with the cherry tree and silver dollar, fictional tales that were designed to illustrate a particular point." 2 .... It is a good story, a chest-puffer; however, there is no evidence that the Jocko legend is true.
I am willing to wager that most people who have black lawn jockeys in their yards have never heard of Jocko Graves or the stories about him. These black-faced, racially caricatured lawn ornaments were not purchased to celebrate the bravery of a little boy, let alone rapresent the bravery of a people. So, why are they in people's yards? Some people inherit them, as I have come to learn from many owners of black lawn jockeys. Others see the lawn jockeys as cute -- though I must confess that when someone describes the black-faced objects as cute, I throw up both my hands. ...The Jocko story has another chapter which is almost as remarkable as its creation account, and this one seems slightly more plausible. Charles Blockson, a historian and collector of Underground Railroad artifacts, claims that from the late 1700s through the Civil War, lawn jockeys were used to warn escaped slaves of danger or to signal that a building was a safe house. 4 A brightly colored ribbon or fabric tied to the statue's arm or a lighted lantern affixed in its hands sent messages to runaway slaves: red meant danger and green, safety.
A problem with this account, however, is that the use of red and green as signal colors dates back to World War I railroad signals, long after the late-1700s as suggested by Blockson. Nevertheless, it is possible that runaway slaves and their supporters used red colors to indicate danger and green colors to mean it was safe to stop. After all, it only needed to be understood by runaway slaves and their helpers, and any agreed upon signals could work. .....Another potential problem with this story is that runaway slaves often traveled at night and the darkness would have made it difficult to see different shades of cloth; difficult, to be sure, but not impossible. Frankly, no system for escape was without problems for the slave. If a slave had to get precariously close to a home to see the signal, well, that is what he or she had to do. And, though it was not preferred, some runaway slaves traveled in daylight. Of course, a signal would have been easy to send by lighting a lantern and placing it in the hand of the lawn jockey so that light-off might have meant that the house was full and had no more room for runaways. I do not doubt that a black-faced lawn ornament was used as a signal to slaves. After all, there had to be ways to send otherwise cryptic messages to runaways, and given that slavery lasted more than two hundred years, it is likely that it happened at least once. Nevertheless, there is little evidence that this practice was widespread.
At the risk of being polemic, are the families that have black-faced lawn jockeys honoring the slaves who fled for their lives or the families that aided them? I doubt it. The contemporary families who own and display lawn jockeys have most likely not heard of Jocko Graves or the stories about lawn jockeys and the Underground Railroad.
Let us be honest, some people find lawn jockeys nostalgic, reminiscent of the "good old days" of Jim Crow segregation. The black-faced servant with the stooped back is a reminder of the decades when Blacks occupied the bottom rung on America's racial hierarchy -- a time when Blacks "knew their place." After World War II, White residents of new housing developments, "perhaps to give themselves more of a sense of being a member of the privileged master class, began placing 'Jocko' on their lawns in great numbers," wrote Kenneth W. Goings in his book Mammy and Uncle Mose. 5 I can tell you that more than a half-century later lawn jockeys are still seen by African Americans as markers of "White space," objects that send this message to Blacks: "You are not welcome here." ....Is it possible that black lawn jockeys became popular because of the preeminence of Blacks as horse racing jockeys? Slaves were often used to train horses and, not surprisingly, some slaves became skillful as horse riders. After all, why pay White riders in a slave economy? Horse racing was very popular in the 1800s. There were many races where all or most of the jockeys were African Americans. After Emancipation, Blacks continued to dominate major horse racing events. At the first race of the famed Kentucky Derby in 1875, 13 of the 15 riders were African Americans. Blacks rode the winners of 15 of the first 28 Kentucky Derby races. The dominance of Black jockeys ended just before World War I as Whites brought Jim Crow norms into horse racing. I am not arguing that black lawn jockeys came into existence because Blacks dominated professional horse racing, but I do believe that the popularity of the objects coincided with the dominance of Black jockeys. This fact was not lost on the makers, distributors, and buyers of lawn jockeys.
So, where does this leave us? There is no consensus on the jockey's origin. You can accept one of the legends (theories?) that I mentioned above, but the fact is that there is little evidence that supports these accounts. For years I have tried to find the name of the company that first received a patent for the lawn jockey, and I have sought to identify the first designer of the Jocko version -- in both searches I have failed. Of course, a greater aid to our understanding would be to find slave narratives that discuss the lawn jockeys. But no such narratives exist, to my knowledge (I hope that I am wrong). Thus, there is no consensus on the jockey's origin, but I do believe that there is a consensus view in African American communities that black lawn jockeys are demeaning relics of a racist past. They may not have started out with a racist meaning -- or always had that meaning -- but that is the meaning they have today. There are, undoubtedly, non-racist reasons for owning and displaying black lawn jockeys, but it would be hard for an adult American to claim that he or she does not know that many African Americans find lawn jockeys racially offensive, especially the ones with jet-black skin and oversized lips.....
= new reply since forum marked as read
were standardized by railway signals during the World War I era.[4]
You're getting pushback for a reason, and the source you keep touting links to a source that discredits the premise. 
