Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography

by Martin A. Berger, David J. Garrow (Foreword)

Seeing through Race is a boldly original reinterpretation of the iconic photographs of the black civil rights struggle. Martin A. Berger’s provocative and groundbreaking study shows how the very pictures credited with arousing white sympathy, and thereby paving the way for civil rights legislation, actually limited the scope of racial reform in the 1960s. Berger analyzes many of these famous images―dogs and fire hoses turned against peaceful black marchers in Birmingham, tear gas and clubs wielded against voting-rights marchers in Selma―and argues that because white sympathy was dependent on photographs of powerless blacks, these unforgettable pictures undermined efforts to enact―or even imagine―reforms that threatened to upend the racial balance of power.

Genres: Photography, Race, History, Nonfiction, African American, Art, Sociology

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

My work explores the role played by the visual arts in identity formation. Making use of an eclectic assortment of primary evidence, including painting, photography, architecture, film and literature, I analyze how Americans both resist and embrace dominant norms of identity. While specifically concerned with the impact of identity formation on disempowered peoples, my scholarship consistently addresses the role of art in representing the identities of our society's most privileged members. In other words, instead of focusing on how images impact our sense of what it means to be "feminine" or "black," I explore how they condition our understanding of being "masculine" and "white."Concerned that the historical emphasis of scholars on representations of disempowered peoples has inadvertently reinforced the perception that empowered identities are fixed, or even natural, I illuminate their constructed and fluid nature. Because the identity of blacks, for example, has long been defined in opposition to that of whites, it is clear that privileged racial categories must play a significant role in impacting the lived experiences of people of color. People of color are ultimately harmed by racial norms and expectations that disadvantage them, but also by racial values that confer unearned advantages to whites.My 2005 book, Sight Unseen, explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through a careful analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, I illustrate how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly guides what European-Americans see, what they accept as true, and ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I think you could get away with reading my review of a book and that would be enough. That's why it is important that I start this review by saying that reading this review really isn't going to be 'enough' - you do need to get your hands on this book. Mitchell uses the title of this book for his series of lectures on racism. This is a stunning book and required reading, I'm afraid.

Now, there are things I have recently learnt about this subject that might help in understanding where this book is coming from. The first is that the US response to the Civil Rights struggle is being increasingly understood in terms of the Cold War. During the Cold War the US was trying to win third world countries into the fold. This was difficult as the US was only partly interested in national independence movements - that is, when these movements removed colonies from European powers the US proved interested - when it meant the liberation of such peoples from their local and compliant masters - the US proved much less interested. The same is true today, of course. All the same, the point was to present capitalism as a viable alternative for third world populations that were tending to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union. This made the embarrassment of the civil rights demonstrations quite intense in the halls of power in the US. Some have said that it was this embarrassment that finally lead to those in power in the US doing something to 'fix' this problem.

This book is an extended meditation on the role of photographs in shaping and explaining the civil rights movement to various populations within the US.

Photographs played an incredibly important role in this movement - but different populations in the US saw quite different photographs. In fact, while this was literally true - it could also be argued (and is) that even when they saw the same photograph different groups were seeing quite different things.

Basically, we are going to talk about three different groups in the US - there are actually more than this discussed in the book - but let's keep this easy. There are Black Americans, Northern Liberal Whites and Southern Racist Whites.

It is too easy to describe these groups as non-overlapping sets - but this is certainly not the case. As is repeatedly pointed out the Black American group was anything but a unified whole or single force. Many, many liberal Northern Whites were basically as racist as their Southern counterparts. However, the stereotype is that during the civil rights movement Northern Whites were embarrassed by the terrible actions of Southern White extremists and finally had to act to fix things.

So many of the photos that appear in Northern White newspapers show Black Americans being brutalised by Southern Whites. Blacks are shown as passive victims. They are shown as being devoid of agency, that is, they are acted on, never actors. This fit the Northern Liberal psyche perfectly, as the point was that they knew Blacks were basically children and so Black freedom could only come about through the actions of whites - good Northern Whites like them. Worse still - there was a real sense that it was the extreme actions of some Southern Whites - turning fire hoses on Black demonstrators or vicious dogs on Black children - that was the 'cause', the self-defeating 'cause' of the end of segregation.

The problem here is that this reinforces the racial stereotype that Blacks are essentially children and therefore need Whites to win their battles for them. It also erases the endless, terrifying, hard work of organising and participating that was the work of Black activists. That is, Blacks do all the work for civil rights, put their bodies in harms way and worse and yet somehow the only way to understand the success of this movement is through White agency, never Black actions.

There is a really interesting part of this where JFK is presented in the newspapers as having been emotionally upset over the particularly hideous treatment of Black demonstrators - whereas, the minutes of the meeting in which he was supposed to be upset makes no mention of his emotional state over these photos at all, but does mention that he was concerned with how this whole thing would be seen overseas and seen as a positive by Southern Whites.

Interestingly, his survey of Black newspapers shows images of Blacks as active and involved - quite the opposite of how they were mostly shown in White newspapers. Liberal White newspapers tended to not show images of active Blacks - particularly Black men. And so, increasingly the movement was one seen though images of Black children - generally nameless.

The perfect example of what this means comes from the discussion of the use of images in the Emmitt Till murder - a Black child with a name. I didn't know about this case before reading this book - however, apparently it did much to politicise people like Cassius Clay.

A 14 year old Black child went to visit family in Mississippi from the North. While there he was showing off to some friends and said to a white woman serving in a shop as he was leaving, "Bye baby." The woman's husband decided this was effectively rape and so he and some friends kidnapped this child, tortured him and dumped his body in a river weighed down with a huge piece of metal. This was essential, as given he was a child the whole 'we did this because he was a potential rapist' shit story probably wasn't really going to work if this child's body was found. In the most telling part of the trail one of the murderers said that they took a large metal fan that they could use to sink the body - and this was the only time they felt afraid as they might get caught and people might think they had stolen the fan. The fact they had the dead or dying body of a 14 year old child in their van meant nothing to them and they knew would mean nothing legally either.

When Till's body was found his mother demanded he be put on display in an open coffin - his body was horribly disfigured and decomposing. She said that there had been too much hiding of White treatment of Black people and it would only end when it was made visible. An incredibly heroic, brave and wise woman - 50 years later my heart still goes out to her. So, we have three groups - so which groups printed images of this child in their newspapers? If you guessed only the Black newspapers you are sadly correct. Despite the mother wanting this to occur, despite there being precedent for showing such images during WW2, no White paper showed these images. Southern Whites never showed any images of Blacks except when they were engaged in criminal activity. Ironically, there had been a long and disgusting tradition in the South of sending postcards of lynchings to friends - Black bodies handing from trees - but even this taste was subdued in this case.

This book is fascinating as it shows how - just like words - we choose the images that will communicate the message we want to communicate. For Liberal Whites that message tended to be that Blacks were childlike and therefore needed Northern 'nice' Whites to provide whatever limited form of freedom Blacks could deal with - you know, about as much as children can be trusted with. For Southern Whites images of Blacks marching induced fear and therefore encouraged violent responses. And for Blacks all too often the images that seemed to win them the most support in the short term from Whites ended up being images that took away their adult agency. As such, it contributed to the long term disempowerment of Blacks. This could so easily have been different if the hard decision of Northern Whites had been taken to show Blacks in positions of power and agency - but as the discussion in this book about he Black Power Salute at the 68 Olympics makes clear - powerful Blacks with agency was not something any Whites where ready for in any context.

This is an amazing book. I can't recommend it too highly. It should be compulsory reading, not just because it tells an incredibly important story - but because the methods used in understanding these photographs in this book is a powerful example of how readers and viewers of images can protect themselves against such constructions in the future.

This is a stunningly good read. My favourite quote in the book, though, is from a woman who says of King's "I have a dream" speech - we have enough dreams, now we want jobs. Too bloody right.

[Brad Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Martin Berger's scholarly work, he argues, that the handful of "iconic" photographs endlessly reproduced in the newspapers and magazines of the period an in the history books that followed, were selected from among the era's hundreds of thousands of images for a reason: they stuck to a restricted menu of narratives that performed reassuring symbolic work."

To put it another way, whites had a narrative of black/white relations in the crisis that they insisted on "seeing" in the images released for publication, and that narrative was reinforced by selecting images of passive blacks, under the oppression of white agency, or action. This narrative, rooted deeply in American history, gave progressive white people and their press, permission to publish images of blacks getting dogs sicced upon them, water hoses trained on them, or mocking crowds dumping food on them at lunch counters. "The white penchant for spectacle, comfort reporting from the perspective of white actors and even their liberal politics led white reporters and editors to downplay the bravery and accomplishments of blacks as they conjured a fantasy of black passivity in the face of white aggression." he writes on page 22. Berger notes throughout the book that even for "well meaning whites" (think, "progressive") photos that showed active blacks and inactive whites were not appealing and rarely made the cut for publication.

While there are in the record, images of empowered blacks, Berger nuances their reality by arguing that even they are situated in the dominant narrative preferred by whites and scorned by progressive blacks. Interestingly, he records the progressive black dismay over MLK's I Have a Dream speech for simply "dreaming" rather than "remaking" the country, despite the photographic record of King standing beneath strong and towering columns of the Lincoln Memorial with a gesture of strength. In another example, Berger displays Ernest Withers' photograph of Memphis sanitation strikers standing in a line carrying placards that read, "I AM A MAN". The image evokes memory of abolition-era medallions that asked the question, "Am I Not A Man?" and Berger argues that a 1968 assertion of humanity is undercut by the need to make still make that basic, human claim 130 years later.

Berger's evidence is rooted in a study of the contrast between images that were published in Black media outlets and white ones. How images were captioned by the two sides, and how readers responded in their letters to the editor reinforces Berger's contention that how whites and blacks "see race" largely determined what got printed and what didn't, and what it reveals about white people (which was Berger's main focus, rather than on what it reveals about both groups).

An incisive, if not controversial claim Berger makes is that the "appeal of the civil rights photographs to whites rested largely on their ability to focus white attention on acts of violence and away from historically rooted inequities in public accommodation, voting rights, housing policies, and labor practices. Because viewers imagined ha the meaning of the photographs reside in the captured scenes, photos of policemen loosing attack dogs or of firemen plying their hoses scripted the "problem" of race as violence. This narrative let whites who condemned or simply avoided racial violence off the hook."

How whites saw it, he argues, was that "violence" was the problem, not systemic injustice. "Racists" were the violent Southern thugs, and only them. A northern white who ignored the societal, national problem protesters were trying to draw attention to, could sleep well at night and do nothing. Berger notes that once King began moving his protests into northern cities and opening speaking about poverty and, later, the wrongness of the Vietnam war, the northern response was decidedly cooler than it had been when all they saw were pictures of "white police thugs" beating up passive blacks. Berger is direct: Images that showed black agency, black activism were scorned.

The author took a dive into the pool of shame and guilt and analyzed how those psychological emotions weave their way into the photographic record of the era. Situated in a Cold War context, Berger notes that what shame many northern whites felt complex. While it had elements of personal failure, shame was produced as well as whites considered what the images said to a watching world about their "nation." The images condemned in the minds of whites, not so much a problem with white people, but a hypocrisy of a nation that was trying to be the beacon of freedom and justice to the world and yet couldn't pull it off at home. Blacks saw the images as a racial tragedy, not a national one. For them it was wholly personal.

Berger's point on this distinction is made in a fascinating expose of the role dogs have played in American racial discrimination. The famous image of '63 in which a police dog is sicced on a 15 year old Walter Gadsden, for blacks, conjures up a collective memory of how whites have used canines throughout US history as a tool of control and fear. Dogs as tracking agents of runaway slaves show up in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Legion of Liberty (published by the New York Anti-slavery society), Frederick Douglass' Narrative, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Conjure Woman, published in 1899. Douglass's Independence Day speech in 1852 noted that the essence of slavery was summed up in the images of "burnt or flayed flesh, manacled limbs, sundered families and humans being hunted by dogs." Berger notes succinctly, that whites saw Birmingham dogs as disgusting, where black saw them as terrifying.

Women and children played a key role in the civil rights movement as symbolized by, among others, Rosa Parks and the Children's March in Birmingham in 1963. Here too, how whites viewed the photographic record of their involvement is telling. Women, Berger writes, were a "middle ground" in the cast of protesters, the "next best group" after children to illicit sympathy from whites when pictured as passive victims of white violence, especially when placed in social contexts that "highlighted their 'childlike' traits.

While some criticized the tactics of King to use kids in the protest movement, King new that children had a vested interest in protest participation, as the crushing weight of poverty and the limited opportunities for adult prosperity was keenly felt by black children in all parts of the country. King also knew that children were, as Berger says it, "linked in the white imagination to traits valued in black protesters, and thus their presence simply increased the odds of capturing the attention and sympathy of whites."

Kids against cops was the perfect tactic to draw this out, and King knew it. White response varied however. Many criticized King for using kids. Others felt racial shame, while criticizing the police who jailed the children. By disapproving of both, liberal whites could hold themselves "above the fray." Though using kids was "a last resort" for King, he knew that their treatment would make Jim Crow "more vivid" to whites than perhaps anything else, and so he did. It was a "good vs evil" display like none other.

[Bob Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

In January, I had the opportunity to hear Martin A. Berger at the Chicago Art Institute. He spoke about the impact of art and how it informs our understanding of history. As I listened to his lecture, I looked him up and planned to order any book he wrote. This book was the first I ordered.

In a world where we talk about “fake news” and how the media spins the truth, this book focuses specifically on the impact that Civil Rights photography had on white and black sympathies and engagement. Berger shows how the choices made by photographers and journalists during the Civil Rights movement to urge white sympathy often undermined the efforts for change. I highly recommend this read as you consider the imagery and journalism we experience currently in our country.

[Allen George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though the arguments sometimes become flawed against the overwhelming backdrop of media contradiction, the work makes a compelling case for the reinterpretation of civil rights media.

[James Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I've read in grad school thus far. Reads as a case study of liberalism's greatest success, which, by dint of being simply liberal, is also its greatest failure.

[Amy]

Recommended by Malcolm Gladwell in David and Goliath