Abstract
Photography has played an obvious role in black liberation movements. In the fight for civil rights, both the supporters of segregation and its opponents forged a stereotyped picture of their enemy. Our hypothesis is that the photographs from the mainstream media played an ambiguous role. They participated in the creation of two types of enemy shown as a threat to democracy: the hateful and violent white supporter of segregation, on the one hand, and the hateful and violent black nationalists, on the other. Their images testified against racism, but also circumscribed the movement to narrow legal objectives. The northern media created a two-sided picture of the black activists. First, to exonerate the northern liberals, they offered a reassuring view of racism in which the enemy was the violently racist white-trash barbarians from the Old South. In these pictures the southern activists are helpless victims, as was the case with Rosa Parks in the most widely distributed pictures of her. Second, the black nationalists were later portrayed as hateful and violent and disrespectful of American values. In doing so, the Northern media forged a dichotomy between a supposed peaceful and nonviolent movement before 1964, and a violent and useless black power era after 1965. But history is more complex than suggested by these well-known pictures.
Highlights
A Liberal Agenda the black student organization Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1961 to 1965, “these pictures from the national broadcasting networks and nationally prominent news publications, [...] wholly white-owned, invariably whitestaffed and largely white oriented media crucially shaped popular perceptions of the Movement” (Bond 2001: 16)
44 Many photographs about the Black Freedom Movement have been often analyzed from the point of view of their content and of their reception: according to Michele Giordano
Antoine Prost warns us: “Photography carries conviction: how could film not have fixed the truth?”16 (About & Chéroux 2001) Photojournalism cannot be understood outside the economic and editorial context that led to the selection of specific images
Summary
10 Before the “classical period” of the movement, between the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and the first Civil Rights Act in 1964, photographers like Gordon Parks began forging a new image of their community. In their work, photography reveals the beauty and power of the African American cultural experience, while documenting and affecting social change. 15 Sammie Dean Parker, standing on the far left of the picture (Chappell et al 2004: 70) was leading the persecution against the 9 black students and was expelled from the high school for her violence In spite of these tense days, in the midst of a strong stand against desegregation by white Southerners as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum, the two women, Hazel and Elizabeth, became friends at the university, as revealed by David Margolick (2012). This photograph belongs to a rather broad category of violent images, which highlight the vicious behavior of some whites and put in place the figure of the hero-martyr. L. King 2011: 30)
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