"Glad my orange right-rear paw goes so well with your purse."
There are a lot of ideas about where the rabbit foot as a talisman originated, but the strongest one in terms of modern rabbit feet is Hoodoo, a spirituality that evolved from African folk magic mixing with Western influence during the slave trade. Like a lot of folk magic, Hoodoo occasionally calls for the use of bones. When practices called for the use of human bones and no one was willing to chop a dude up for his skeleton bits, Hoodoo practitioners would use animal bones as a substitute.
Folklorist Bill Ellis speculates that during a time when America was doing everything in its power to blatantly fuck over black people, many black people may have found courage in the rabbit, which is traditionally a clever character in a lot of African folklore.
White people, in a shocking move that's never happened before or since, appropriated the idea of a rabbit foot as a powerful good-luck charm and began selling them, attaching all sorts of rules to ensure the foot was imbued with evil magic that made them lucky. The "logic" being, if you crammed enough evil into it and carried it with you, evil would ignore you. Like when zombies ignore Rick and the gang on The Walking Dead when they slather themselves in zombie guts.
AMC