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

Katharine Capshaw has generated some of the past decade’s best scholarship in children’s literature. Her 2004 book, Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (published under the name Katharine Capshaw Smith), won the Book Award from the Children’s Literature Association, and in 2014 she delivered that association’s prestigious Francelia Butler Lecture. Capshaw’s new book, Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks, extends Capshaw’s record of excellence while turning to a relatively unfamiliar genre: the “photobook,” meaning a work of fiction or nonfiction, intended for child readers (sometimes in conjunction with adults), in which photographs carry much of the narrative. She considers works of fiction and poetry that use photographs as illustrations and also nonfictional works of history or biography, particularly photographic compendiums. Capshaw persuasively argues that African American photobooks work to envision black children as cultural agents, to demand change, and to urge children toward activism. She argues, too, that the intersection of childhood and photography has been crucial to the development of what Leigh Raiford and Renee C. Romano call “consensus memory” of the civil rights movement (216). In other words, dominant narratives of civil rights, and of twentieth-century African American history more generally, coalesce around black childhood and the visual medium of photography. Civil Rights Childhood examines photobooks as one crucial site in which that cultural work occurred.

The book proceeds chronologically, with two opening chapters focusing on the 1940s and 1950s. In her first chapter, Capshaw reads fictional African American photobooks by Jane Dabney Shackelford, Ellen Tarry, Langston Hughes, and Roy DeCarava. She characterizes these books as “trickster texts” (p. xi) that avoided explicit calls for reform but quietly represented school integration and other social justice issues and that “dismantle[d] assumptions of black familial degradation” (3). The subject of Capshaw’s second chapter is coffee table-style compilations of photographs from African American history—books that invited coreading by African American adults and children. Capshaw examines Langston Hughes’s and Milton Meltzer’s bestselling Pictorial History of the Negro against Louis B. Reynolds’s less-known Little Journeys into Storyland. These compendiums, Capshaw argues, linked historical narrative to photographs “to inspire social activism in the reader” (66). Both books used photographs’ aura of objectivity to imbue their books—and thus their books’ call for social justice—with an appearance of impartiality.

Capshaw’s third chapter stands out for its recovery and masterful close analysis of one astonishing and nearly forgotten photobook. That book, Today, was published in 1965 by the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), which was a very early Head Start program. The book depicts one day in the life of a CDGM preschool center, representing black children’s play and bookmaking as powerful tools in the civil rights movement. Capshaw argues compellingly that Today “uses photography to insist on the urgency, the now, of children’s psychological transformation” (153).

The books analyzed in Capshaw’s fourth and fifth chapters grapple with the unfinished business of the civil rights movement and call— more explicitly than the books analyzed in chapters one and two—for readers’ social engagement. During the 1960s and 1970s, photobooks by Kali Grosvenor, John Shearer, and June Jordan, as well as those by Toni Morrison, Imamu Amiri Baraka, and Fundi (Billy Abernathy), articulated Black Arts Movement concepts of “childhood as an icon of both the black nation and that nation in generative process of development” (xxiv). Thus these books “invited collaboration, development, and continuance” (168)—that is, black children’s political activism. Capshaw’s final chapter examines photobooks from the 1990s to the present, arguing that nonfictive, fictive, and poetic works by Walter Dean Myers, Ruby Bridges, Toni Morrison, and Carole Boston Weatherford “revisit iconic photographs” such as those of Emmett Till or the “four little girls” murdered in Birmingham in 1963 “in order to reveal their inability to tell the whole story of the movement” (xii). Capshaw’s stunning conclusion analyzes the use...