For All the World to See: Memorializing the Images of the Civil Rights Movement (original) (raw)
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The Enemy Within: The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Enemy Pictures
Angles, 2020
The 20 th century could be described as the one that gave birth to a new "civilization of the image." (Gusdorf 1960: 11). By using images in its nation-building efforts, the United States has been a forerunner through what François Brunet called "Amériqueimage", a huge picture-book in which photographs of the Civil Rights Movement have a dedicated slot at a time when television was becoming a mass media (Brunet & Kempf 2001). The best-known pictures of the Civil Rights Movement have thus become places of memory, iconic images testifying to the ultimate triumph of democracy.
Seeing is Believing: An Analysis of Photos Taken During the Civil Rights Movement
Ever since I was a young girl my mother would tell me stories about her life when she was growing up in the same hometown that we still live in. In elementary school she would have to walk home for lunch and then back again once the period was over. She showed me the house were my grandmother was the maid to a white family and told me the tale of how a group of white school boys dressed up in KKK outfits and chased her home. She then had her older brothers chase them back and beat them up. My mom grew up in the 1950s and knows what it was like to live before, during and after the civil rights movement. It's interesting to hear her experiences during the civil rights era compared to what they taught me throughout elementary and high school. We learned about some of the main contributors of the movement including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Park. The topics of freedom riders, marches, sit-ins, whites only and blacks only were common discussions that we had during class. Movies have reenacted important times during the civil rights movement including King (1978), Malcolm x (1992) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) are able to show us a simple example of life during the time of the movement, but nothing competes to a real capturing moment taken during one of
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2020
Comics, offers a compelling argument of the prominence of graphic narratives in understanding the civil rights movement. Working with the concept of consensus memory, Santos focuses on five graphic novels, all of which seek to expand the archive of the civil rights movement by including narratives of actors and events often left out of mainstream historical narratives. That is, Santos asks us to embrace comics as a way of critically thinking about how history is told and re-told. In his epilogue 'Cyclops Was Right: X-Lives Matter!' Santos considers the X-men comics' role in processing traumatic histories, creating space for imagination in healing practices for kids (and adults) of colour. Citing Michel Foucault in his introduction, Santos writes that graphic narratives emphasise 'multiple temporalities existing "side-by-side"' (8), which makes them a crucial strategy in understanding historical moments. Graphic Memories offers a tremendous contribution to the field of graphic narrative and comics studies concerning how their creative techniques can 'foster in their readers a metacritical awareness of history as an editorial and curative process' (3). The texts Santos engages with in the formation of his argument all offer re-framings and additions to popular memories of the civil rights movement, emphasising the limitations and political nature of the archive. The first chapter, 'The Icon of the Once and Future King,' begins with an analysis of Ho Che Anderson's comics biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Here, Santos analyzes how King disrupts the 'icon King' that the U.S. has come to know and love. In other words, the 'icon King,' as termed by Santos, is a fictionalized, simplified figure that only emcompasses the positives of MLK Jr. and the civil rights movement. Santos emphasises the ways in which King aims to disrupt and complicate the popular narrative to expand the collective memory about MLK Jr. and the civil rights movement. Chapter 2, 'Bleeding Histories on the March,' discusses John Lewis's graphic memoir March, which focuses on the large network of activists that made the civil rights movement happen. With March, Santos returns to the concept of temporality as he first articulates in his citation of Foucault, noting the 'bleeding' of time displayed on the graphic narrative's pages. Santos continues his analysis of graphic narrative's place in the archive by analyzing comic creators that recreate scenes captured in contemporaneous photographs in Chapter 3,'On PhotoGraphic Narrative.' In this chapter, Santos argues that the recreations used by graphic narrative authors and artists prompt readers to rethink the 'objectivity' of a photograph, articulated in his discussion of Lila Quintero Weaver's Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White. Utilizing specific moments from Weaver's text, Santos discusses how Darkroom posits the Latina immigrant in a unique place defined by her simultaneous juxtaposition of both black or white. With Darkroom, Santos redirects the conversation of the civil rights movements to analyze what Brown, or 'in-between', people were doing and how they were conceptualized in the movement. Moving from 'in-bewteen' bodies to an analysis of physical space, Santos also looks at Mark Long's, Jim Demonakos', and Nate Powell's The Silence of Our Friends: The Civil Rights Struggle Was Never Black and White in his fourth chapter to recount and expand the memory of the locations where the civil rights movement was happening. Santos uses this narrative to analyze how authors seeking
Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict
The Professional Geographer, 2000
Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape-historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums-present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co-constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.
Collective memory theory has been used to study a wide array of phenomena, including the media's role in shaping collective memories of pivotal and influential events throughout society. Often when lacking direct contact and engagement, the media may shape the collective memories of audiences. As such, the current study examines prominent images presented in the media and the potential role each could have contributed to the collective memory of the 1960's Civil Rights Movement. More specifically, this study analyzes how collective memories, which are arguably influenced by the mass media, create memories for audiences that lack direct engagement (e.g., participating in sit-ins) with the Civil Rights Movement. Adopting content analysis, findings posit that certain images from the Civil Rights Movement, along with their reinforcement in media, contributes to what mainstream audiences remember and recall, aligning the movement in favorable and respectable terms.
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2012
T he problem of textual circulation at the heart of this forum has a rich and complicated genealogy. Issues of textual provenance, authenticity, transcription, translation, and accuracy, so central to the inquiries of the Renaissance humanists, 1 have quite recently given way to questions raised by postmodern culture's media-saturated environments: textual fragmentation, distribution, consumption, and redistribution by and in multicultural and frequently transnational publics and counterpublics, in nonsynchronous, nonlinear, nonpunctual interchanges. 2 Few studies, however, have considered the circulation of photographic texts 3 or the question examined in this essay: how might the strategic circulation of some photographic texts and the noncirculation of others serve to buttress a status quo buckling under the assaulting forces of change? How might circulation and noncirculation serve the rhetoric of those seeking to control or stifle that change?
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2007
In this article, we contribute to scholarship on visibility and rhetoric by examining the way in which photographs published in march 1965 issues of life magazine functioned rhetorically to (1) evoke common humanity by capturing moments of embodiment and enactment that challenged the established images of blacks in the minds of whites and held up for scrutiny assumptions and power relationships that had long been taken for granted; (2) evoke common humanity by creating recognition of others through particularity; and (3) challenge taken-for-granted ideas of democracy, reminding viewers that a large gap existed between abstract political concepts like democracy and what was actually occurring in american streets. We conclude by considering the transformative capacity of photojournalism as it mediates between the universal and the particular, and enables viewers to experience epiphanic moments when issues, ideas, habits, and yearnings are crystallized into a single recognizable image. The last 20 years have witnessed a proliferation of museums, public art sculptures, monuments, oral history archives, retrospective books, heritage tours, and other commemorative activities related to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. As historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage suggests, ''power and access to it are central to the creation and propagation of historical memory''; however, it was not until the 1960s that blacks commanded ''the political power necessary to insist on a more inclusive historical memory for the South'' (''No Deed but Memory'' 22