Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. Katharine Capshaw.

Abstract

As I write this review, at least six predominantly black churches have been burned to the ground by arsonists, to relative media silence. These church burnings, in addition to the Charleston, South Carolina, church shootings in June 2015, resemble too closely attacks on churches of the 1960s. It seems as though this political moment has been indelibly marked by violence toward the African American community, which has spurred intense outcry for justice via social media sites and Internet news sources. These events make Katharine Capshaw’s book Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks all the more timely . Civil Rights Childhood explores the ways that photo images envision, investigate, and impact changing definitions of black childhood in relation to civil rights activism throughout several decades of American history. Capshaw constructs her book chronologically, starting with photobooks published in the 1940s and 1950s through photobooks from the 1990s and early 2000s. Each chapter begins with sociohistorical contexts and then analyzes the arguments made by each text through the construction of images and narrative. For Capshaw, each photobook makes a particular argument about how the Civil Rights Movement affected black childhood, and each photobook was crafted based on the political discourse of the time in which it was created.