Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks by Katharine Capshaw (review)

Anyone who has read Katharine Capshaw’s Civil Rights Childhood will find it unsurprising that it won the Children’s Literature Association’s Book Award for the best critical monograph published in the field in 2014—the second time Capshaw has won this award, making her the only scholar, to date, to have done so since its beginning in 1981. Impeccably researched, Civil Rights Childhood takes its theoretical underpinnings from visual rhetoric, African American studies, children’s literature studies, linguistics, poststructuralist criticism, and more, while it also employs primary research from interviews, archival findings and artifacts, and close readings of both texts and images. Perhaps best of all, Capshaw does some incredibly impressive literary recovery work, shedding light on texts completely unfamiliar to many contemporary scholars of either children’s literature or African American studies. While some research has been done on African American children’s and young adult texts of the civil rights era and the decades leading up to it, Capshaw’s is the first work that focuses exclusively on the photobooks for children and young adults from these periods.

Since the term may be unfamiliar to many children’s literature scholars, Capshaw defines a photobook as a book “with a child readership that sequences images and attaches that sequence to a narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional” (xiii). This “capacious definition” (xiii) enables Capshaw to discuss books from a broad range of genres, including fiction and nonfiction, picture books as well as longer works. She opens the volume with the iconic image of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till—perhaps one of the most recognizable photographs related to the civil rights movement. The introduction extensively discusses how this image of a smiling Till, wearing a shirt and tie, and photos of his lynched and mutilated body were “tied together in public awareness” (ix) and therefore communicated effectively to viewers that any child of color in America could suffer the same fate.

Capshaw then clearly delineates what this volume does and does not do. She writes that Civil Rights Childhood “does not stage an instrumentalist reading, does not argue that these books actually caused social change” (xv). She makes clear that the civil rights photobook for children “pushes forward by focusing on the child as a site of cultural instantiation and insisting that narratives should spur new stories and active response” (xvii). And because some of the primary texts in her analysis, such as Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956), clearly helped to convince young African Americans that they, too, could play a part in changing America’s racist society, she argues persuasively for the centrality of these books in young people’s involvement in the civil rights movement. Throughout the text, Capshaw pursues the argument that “Picturing childhood became a powerful instrument in civil rights activism, because children carry an important aura of human value and potential, and threats to the young made the stakes of the movement palpable to individuals and to the nation. Undoubtedly, images of children under siege had generative effects for the civil rights campaign” (xi). Analyses of these images and of the historical contexts surrounding them constitute the majority of this fascinating book.

Capshaw opts for depth over breadth, which leaves readers with rich and varied knowledge about each of the primary texts she discusses. To achieve this depth, she incorporates authors’ biographical details, notes to and from publishers, blurbs from magazine and newspaper clippings, excerpts from speeches, and more. In short, the time and effort that Capshaw invests in each photobook—probably the most extensive critical attention that most of them have received since their publication—reveal these books’ significance and open the door for other scholars to continue those critical conversations. Following an illuminating introduction, Capshaw begins the volume by discussing a few key early picture books for younger readers, progresses to important nonfiction texts written for and read by young people and their...