Visual Culture of the Civil Rights Movement

The meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries. Historical race concepts have varied across time and cultures, creating scientific, social, and political controversy. Of course, today’s definition varies from the scientific racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that justified slavery and later, Jim Crow laws in the early twentieth. It is also different from the genetic inferiority argument that was present at the wake of the civil rights movement. However, despite the constantly shifting concepts, there seems to be one constant that has provided a foundation for ideas towards race: race is a matter of visually observable attributes such as skin color, facial features, and other self-evident visual cues.

Maurice Berger argues that, “much of what defines race in society is innately visual”(6). If a person’s definition of race is often derived from visual cues, does it not stand that attitudes towards race can be manipulated with a direct and strategic use of visual images? Civil rights activists often found themselves asking this question and it served to form the foundation of a visual culture intended to change the minds of a nation. Activist believed that the prevailing attitudes towards race during the civil rights movement could be altered with a strong and strategic visual culture. Visual images not only documented the movement, but they also actively shaped the struggle for civil rights through modes of manipulation and persuasion.

Photographers had begum to document and publicize the issues of the race problem and the struggle for equal rights in the United States in the early 1900s. Early photographs documented protests against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and captured protest...

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...ng them that they were, in fact, human beings that didn’t deserve to be treated like shit.

Write about African American pictorial magazines and positive images.

Gordon Park’s portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton Sr. (pictured above) is unlike most of the images associated with the civil rights movement. Although the subject matter is neither noteworthy nor historical, it had an important purpose in the movement. The portrait was one of twenty images the made up “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” a photo-essay documenting the everyday life of one extended black family, that appeared in the September 1956 issue of Life magazine. However plain or simple the image seemed, Parks, a civil rights photographer, understood the inherent importance of such portraits as a forceful “weapon of choice”(). Write about its intended purpose of empathy.