Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Zoe Trodd Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Leigh Raiford Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011; 312 pages. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3430-5 During the peak years of the desegregation movement, Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly explained that visibility was vital to success. “Injustice must be exposed, with all the tensions its exposure creates,” he wrote in 1963. The following year, he noted that the [End Page 149] activist should “force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly . . . with the rest of the world looking on.” He referenced the media’s coverage of the Birmingham campaign and explained, “The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.” King’s observations reflect a broader understanding on the part of civil rights activists that photography was a key weapon in the freedom struggle. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted and trained photographers, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress of Racial Equality supported several. Some leaders took photographs themselves, including Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young of SCLC, and James Forman and Robert Zellner of SNCC. Activists turned photographs into posters, printed them in pamphlets, and displayed them in freedom houses. Outside civil rights organizations, Gordon Parks, Charles Moore, and Frank Dandridge photographed the movement’s events and figures for Life, and photographs of violence against protestors appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers. Responding to photographs of the 1963 Birmingham campaign that showed police dogs attacking student demonstrators and fire hoses knocking down protestors, Burke Marshall of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice claimed the images “stirred the feelings” of most whites in the country. For his part, President Kennedy said that the images made him “sick”—their eloquence exceeding that of “explanatory words.” Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and previously the coeditor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006), takes her book’s title from King’s description of such photographs as a “luminous glare.” In this first full length study of photography’s relationship to the freedom struggle, she goes further than a recent cluster of very strong books about visuality and the long civil rights movement that began in anti-lynching, including Shawn Michelle Smith’s Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, [End Page 150] and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith’s Lynching Photographs (University of California Press, 2008), Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Elizabeth Abel’s Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010), and Martin Berger’s Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (University of California Press, 2011). By stretching her analysis from the anti-lynching campaign (mainly Ida B. Wells and the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] NAACP), through the Civil Rights Movement (mainly SNCC), to the Black Power Movement (mainly the Black Panther newspaper and Emory Douglas’s photo collages), Raiford is able to chart a shifting, complex, and longstanding relationship between photography and activism, ultimately proving that black visuality has been inextricably connected to the freedom struggle’s construction, development, and consumption. Activists used photographs to remake black identity, reframe national identity, and reject dominant racial ideology, as Raiford demonstrates in this deeply researched and persuasively argued book. Some of the book’s numerous other contributions include an assessment of how activists recontextualized lynching photographs so that their purpose became protest rather than celebration; the demonstration that SNCC’s control of its own media was vital to the movement; and the argument that...