Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930

Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures

66 Creating an Image in Black The Power of Abolition Pictures JOHN STAUFFER “One picture is worth ten thousand words,” the adman Frederick R. Barnard said in Printer’s Ink Magazine in 1927. His quip has of course become an adman’s proverb. Indeed, Barnard may have only given authorship to a saying that had already been around for decades. Admen were not the first group to champion the use of pictures as a means to sell their wares. Abolitionists had done much the same thing. They, like advertisers, relied on images to sell ideas of the good society. But the source of their desire was much different: they sought to end slavery and racism and transform the means of production, rather than generate demand and fuel consumption.1 Reformers in America and Europe became enraptured with the power of the picture beginning around 1830, once changes in lithography and line drawings had enabled large-scale mass production of images in newspapers and magazines.2 Their enemies—the politicians and gatekeepers of the existing order—felt so threatened by their images that they tried to censor them.3 When the young William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator in 1831, what most offended southerners were the images— particularly the masthead, which depicted a slave auction in front of the nation ’s Capitol, the flag of liberty atop its dome, a whipping post in its plaza, and in the foreground a grieving slave family at auction and a discarded Indian treaty (fig. 3.1).Vice President John C. Calhoun, an ardent proslavery advocate, was so outraged by the image that he attempted, unsuccessfully, to ban newspapers with “pictorial representations” of slavery from the mails. Abolitionist texts were tolerable, in his mind, but not images.4 Abolitionists relied heavily on the power of pictures in their reform work. Their desire to transform themselves and their world fueled their interest in images, for images helped to make visible the contrast between their dreams of reform and the sinful present.5 Black abolitionists were particularly invested in the power of images. Creating an Image in Black 67 Some of the most prominent, from Frederick Douglass and William “Ethiop” Wilson to James McCune Smith, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs, embraced the black image as an aid in their reform work. Their rise to public prominence from the mid-1840s through the 1860s paralleled the rise of visual culture, when Americans increasingly began to define themselves with images.6 The twin rise of visual culture and black public personas is not coincidental; black abolitionists relied on images as a way to acquire a public voice, enter into the public sphere, and revise public opinion. Yet the ways in which they used, appropriated, and thought about visual images have been largely ignored.7 Most critics, when discussing African Americans and pictures, focus on how blacks have been objectified. They view the black image as part of the process of exploitation. To be in front of the camera lens, to have one’s body represented, photographed, taken—symbolically if not literally—is to render that body powerless.8 Gazing becomes a masculine, empowering (and “white”) condition, while being seen is a feminine (and “black”) one.9 Yet the process of visual representation is much more complicated. Robyn Wiegman has argued that in the twentieth century, the commodified appearance of the black body became a “representational sign for the democratizing process of U.S. Culture itself.”10 Little has been said about the ways in which black abolitionists sought, in effect, to objectify themselves as a source of power and as an aid in their reform work. From their perspecFigure 3.1. The Liberator masthead, 1830s. Widener Library, Harvard University. 68 JOHN STAUFFER tive, the relation between subject, object, and power looks much different. They wanted to be objects rather than subjects—art objects, in particular— and at times wrote eloquently about the power of pictures. I want to explore the nature of this objectification.  Frederick Douglass relied as much on his image as on his voice and words to create his public persona. He photographed as well as wrote himself into public existence. He was also one of the most perceptive writers in the nineteenth century on the uses of visual images.11 Part of Douglass’s fascination with images stemmed from his faith in “true” art as a social leveler. “True” art for him meant...