'Our Unadmitted Sorrow': the Rhetorics of Civil Rights Photography

Photo 1.

The Obama family, Chicago Illinois, 4 Nov. 2008. President-elect Barack Obama, his wife Michelle Obama, and two daughters, Maila and Sasha, wave to the crowd at an election night rally in Chicago.

© Brooks Kraft/Orbis. Reproduced with permission.

Let me begin with the historical present, with a media scene with which readers will be familiar.

You will recognize the scene from Chicago on 4 November 2008 (Photo 1). This is the new first family. Handsome, beautiful, and black. A functional black American family, walking hand in hand and all (almost all) in step, reminiscent less of the military than the catwalk. Their blackness might almost seem incidental, or in the categories of the times, 'post-racial': hair is straight, a long way from the assertive afros of a different historical epoch. Rhetorically, the photo speaks of America, the figures of Michele and the girls (Malia and Sasha) - given the perspective of the photo - the same size as the prominent Stars and Stripes, the president elect towering over both his family and the many symbols of his nation. There is a harmony, a softness, in the relation between the lighting, the flags and the colour of the clothes of the human figures, and indeed the tone of their skin. They are inescapably black and inescapably American in a way that both seems obvious, and yet at the same time new and strange, de-familiarizing what America has conventionally connoted.

I imagine that we all remember this moment as historical, marking, it seems, the destruction of one epoch and anticipating the foundation of a new political formation. As I see it (taking the view of the longer duration), the extended reign of the Nixon right, begun in 1968 as the counter to Civil Rights and to its adjacent social movements, was finally on the point of disintegrating. After dominating US politics for the past four decades its exhaustion was evident in the person of George W. Bush. The emergent new formation, if we can call it that, was symbolized most fully in terms of Obama's blackness. What kind of political rupture this represented remained an open question: if the reflexes of the Nixon right were finally to be contained, it was not at all clear how the new was to be constituted. On the TV screens through the night of the 4 November the vox pop repeated the refrain: I never thought I would live to see the day, meaning 'I never thought I would live to see the day a black person was elected president of the United States': a sentiment conveyed in the starkest terms by the image of Jesse Jackson - a hard man, a partisan man, a man with a history: Jesse Jackson! - weeping on camera (Photo 2).

These images of Jackson were shown most prominently by Fox News. On the following day in the Los Angeles Times the event accounted for a story in its own right.¹ Those who responded to the story were split between those moved by the pictures of Jackson and those who regarded him as little more than a bruiser or a charlatan, the weight of opinion leaning slightly to the former. Of these, there were many who attested to the fact that it was seeing Jackson weeping that compelled them to shed tears as well. In this sense, they imply, he wept for the nation.

Jackson is far from being an innocent public figure in the US. He himself had sought to run in the presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, fashioning his rainbow coalition. Indeed there is a body of opinion which remains convinced that without Jackson there could have been no Obama. And yet he was also heard on Fox News, during Obama's campaign, uttering crude, derogatory remarks about his colleague.

But most of all he served as the defining symbolic connection between the history of Civil Rights and the Obama campaign of the twenty-first century. Many of those sympathetic to Jackson, in their blogs on the Los Angeles...