Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography by Martin A. Berger

Author:Martin A. Berger [Berger, Martin A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2011-05-01T22:00:00+00:00

49 Horace Cort, Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark Uses His Billy Club on Black Woman, Selma, Alabama, January 25, 1965. AP/Wide World Photos and Horace Cort, New York.

50 Bill Hudson, Policemen Lead a Group of Black School Children to Jail, Birmingham, Alabama, May 4, 1963. AP/Wide World Photos and Bill Hudson, New York.

The absence of images depicting brutalized black children is not an anomaly of the Birmingham campaign; it is a general feature of the photographic canon of the civil rights movement. In theory, the appeal of juxtaposing the inactive and active should have ensured that depictions of the weakest and most submissive victims facing the most brutal and active aggressors would be the most effective images to catalyze white interest. Yet the innocence and vulnerability that whites ascribed to black children was insufficient to ensure the preservation of images of their physical abuse in the visual record of mid-twentieth-century America, never mind to secure the iconicity of such scenes. The idea of child victims both attracted and repelled white Americans: as we have seen, such scenes generated immediate interest, given the extent to which kids resonated as the “perfect” victims, but they also produced profound discomfort, given the racial identification that whites felt with the perpetrators of violence. Alongside the altruistic desire of liberal white editors to reproduce only those images best suited to (safely) advance the cause of black rights was a more selfish need to quash those photographs that reflected poorly on their race. Liberal whites were ultimately as invested in the “appropriate” depiction of white roles as in that of black roles within the canon of civil rights.

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