Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

by Aston Gonzalez

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned.
Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these artist activists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

Genres: History

324 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 2020

Reviews

[T.R. Ormond · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a rich cultural, social and activist context surrounding image production. Gonzalez zeroes in on the context/milieu in African American communities in the 19th century and thereby sheds light on African American participation in discussions around slavery, abolition, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Crucial to these discussions were the illustrations and photographs dealing with education, religious leaders, voting rights, black veterans of the civil war, and ideas about emigration to places like Liberia and Haiti. These images fought in the contested space about race in the US during the 19th century. They hoisted models of dignity and respectability against competing images of stereotypes and scientific racism.

Gonzalez offers the first analysis of visual culture about African Americans in the 19th century made by artists and photographers who were also African American. There have been other such analyses, but these deal with image production by white artists and photographers.

Though the book formally ends during Reconstruction, Gonzalez nevertheless offers an epilogue discussing how the image production of the 19th century influenced W.E.B. Du Bois in the creation of his archive of photographs submitted to the Paris Exhibition of 1900.

[Sue]

Well written and researched.