Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks by Katharine Capshaw
Deeply researched and engagingly written, Katharine Capshaw’s Civil Rights Childhood builds on the work of literary, media, civil rights, and children’s history scholars as it delineates the role child-centered photobooks played, and continue to play, in a dynamic civil rights movement. Attentive to the particular sociopolitical settings of these books, as well as to the agency of children, she opens for our consideration new spaces of civil rights activism and new ways of understanding children’s political possibilities.
Turning first to fictional books by Jane Dabney Shackleford, Ellen Terry, and Langston Hughes, Capshaw uncovers the ways that these “trickster texts” challenged racial injustice at a time when straightforward criticisms of racial inequalities were imprudent, even dangerous (xi). Drawing on the [End Page 517] antiauthoritarian values of progressive education, contemporary ideals about American childhood and families, and the tenets of midcentury liberalism, these authors subtly disassembled negative black stereotypes and argued against the racial status quo, all while asserting the dignity, agency, and resilience of black youth. Textual silence on salient racial issues did not mean acquiescence.
Chapter 2 explores historically oriented photobooks of the 1950s, showing how Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer’s popular Pictorial History of the Negro and Louis B. Reynold’s Little Journeys into Storyland used the seeming objectivity of photographs to argue for social justice and encourage young people to engage in social action at a critical moment in movement history. Nonthreatening texts provided “necessary cover” for the more radical messages about resistance, racial equality, and children as agents of political change that the photographs alongside them conveyed (103). Those messages, in turn, sometimes directly inspired young readers’ involvement in the civil rights movement.
In chapter 3 Capshaw recovers a remarkable 1965 photobook created by the Child Development Group of Mississippi. Intended to “demystify print” and encourage emergent readers, it reflected the program’s respect for the experiences and perspectives of rural black children and the CDGM’s commitment to a “democratic creative theory” that privileged process over product (129, 139). In Today, children’s voices and images express the importance of community, inner freedom, and the transformative power of play.
Capshaw’s insightful analysis in chapter 4 similarly identifies the ways that child-authored Poems by Kali (Grosvenor), John Shearer’s I Wish I Had an Afro, and June Jordan’s Dry Victories embodied Black Arts Movement values. Portraying children as agents of psychological decolonization who question systems of power, resist constraints, and shape the urban landscape, BAM photobooks located “black essence and futurity” in children. (157). Finally, in chapter 5 Capshaw turns to civil rights narratives in more recent photobooks by Walter Dean Myers, Ruby Bridges, Toni Morrison, and Carole Boston Weatherford, exploring relationships between representations of childhood, consensus memory, and the “politicized position of children” in both the past and present (268).
A model of cross-disciplinary scholarship, Capshaw’s theoretical and analytical depth brings revelations on every page. Her careful attention to the layered meanings of child-centered photobooks, the historical and aesthetic context of their production, and their reception helps us better understand the movement, including shifting expectations for young people’s participation in civil rights politics. Uncovering the range of movement representations of [End Page 518] children in largely overlooked photobooks, she reminds us of the importance of children, as subjects and actors, to the black freedom struggle.
