In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Circulation and Noncirculation of Photographic Texts in the Civil Rights Movement: A Case Study of the Rhetoric of Control
  • Sean Patrick O’Rourke (bio)

The problem of textual circulation at the heart of this forum has a rich and complicated genealogy. Issues of textual provenance, authenticity, transcription, translation, and accuracy, so central to the inquiries of the Renaissance humanists,1 have quite recently given way to questions raised by postmodern culture’s media-saturated environments: textual fragmentation, distribution, consumption, and redistribution by and in multicultural and frequently transnational publics and counterpublics, in nonsynchronous, nonlinear, nonpunctual interchanges.2 Few studies, however, have considered the circulation of photographic texts3 or the question examined in this essay: how might the strategic circulation of some photographic texts and the noncirculation of others serve to buttress a status quo buckling under the assaulting forces of change? How might circulation and noncirculation serve the rhetoric of those seeking to control or stifle that change?

Working from the assumption that the civil rights movement was a fundamentally rhetorical activity, this short essay considers the rhetoric of visual argument in the photographs published (and not published) by the [End Page 685] Greenville Piedmont (afternoon) and the Greenville News (morning), two southern newspapers of predominantly white readership opposed to the civil rights movement in Greenville, South Carolina. The historical work of David Davies, Jeanine Hayek, Andrew Secrest, and Pulitzer Prize winners Gene Roberts and Hank Kilbanoff4 has established the importance of the national media’s portrayal of southern racism and resistance to the overall success of the civil rights movement. However, the white segregationist southern media fought back5 and, as I hope to show, one way in which they did so was to reduce the movement, in word and image, to something considerably less than it was: smaller, less powerful, and with fewer participants. A brief look at one key event in 1960—the New Year’s Day march on the Greenville Airport to protest segregated waiting rooms and facilities— suggests that noncirculation of photographic texts was central to the rhetoric of resistance, demonstrating a subtle and nuanced understanding of the rhetorical importance of photographic circulation and noncirculation.

Greenville, the third-largest metropolitan area in South Carolina, is an old textile town located in the Upstate, 55 miles south of the North Carolina border, now on the I85 corridor and AMTRAK line between Atlanta and Charlotte. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v. Board of Education (consolidating four separate cases, one of which, Briggs v. Elliott, was on appeal from South Carolina),6 Life magazine ran a series of articles on race relations in five southern cities. Greenville was featured in the September 17, 1956 issue, where Mayor Kenneth Cass claimed that “there’s always been a good feeling in the race situation” in Greenville and predicted that the good relations between black and white residents would remain unless an outside agitator “comes in and stirs it up.”7 These themes, “good relations,” minimal local discontent, and “outside agitation,” remained stable features of segregationists’ defense of their system, especially in the rhetorical efforts of Wayne C. Freeman and William D. Workman Jr. of the Greenville News. Freeman was editor of the News and also served as an officer of The Gressette Committee, the citizens’ council officially known as the South Carolina Segregation Committee. Over the course of several years Freeman wrote editorials defending segregation “as morally right, legally right, and necessary for the preservation of peace and good order.”8 Workman was the News’s political correspondent in Columbia, who also wrote for Charleston’s Post and Courier and Columbia’s The State, and who published the segregationist The Case for the South in 1960.9 Their efforts [End Page 686] served to embed the themes of “good relations,” minimal local discontent, and “outside agitation” into the media’s coverage of civil rights protests and to wrap them in what Jennie Hill has identified as a frame of “victimage”— the notion that somehow the South was a victim of the slander, discrimination, and violence of northern integrationists and their southern stooges.10

Greenville’s civil rights protests began in 1960 and...

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