Worth A Thousand Words

By Harvey Bakari

Can a picture really be worth a thousand words? Can images change how one race of people view and treat another race? This is a brief summary of the role that visual arts and technological inventions played in shaping race relations between white and black Americans.

Generally, technological inventions are neutral; however, its application can be used to advance or oppress societies. The inventions of the printing press, art printmaking, photography, motion pictures (films and movies), radio, and television were used to advance civilization while simultaneously supporting European explorations, conquests, and oppression, particularly of enslaved Africans in the Americas.

In the 1440s, the Portuguese began naval explorations into Africa, south of the Sahara, followed by Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the Americas in 1492. The invention of the printing press enabled explorers and travelers to publish their literature and illustrations in books that circulated among philosophers, private venture companies, monarchies, and church and state governments in Europe. The literature and art illustrations largely depicted Africans as subhuman, animals, savages, or heathens without a history or civilization.

By the early 1500s, Europeans sought to enslave Africans in the Americas, after initially using the forced labor of Native Americans and white indentured servants, whom served for 4 to 7 years. European philosophers and theologians claimed that slavery provided Africans the benefits of civilization and Christianization. Such theories justified and supported white superiority, the slave trade, slavery, and the economic profits that transformed Europe and the Americas.

Essentially, from the 1500s to the 1700s, the Atlantic slave trade was unchallenged among European countries until the abolition movement in England campaigned to end the trade. Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Olaudah Equiano, and other abolitionists effectively used lectures and print media like books, newspapers, and broadsides to advocate abolition. Artists’ illustrations were critically important to visually exposing the horrors of the slave trade. Illustrations of torture, amputations, rape, separations of families, pregnant women, whippings, and bondage proved an effective means to generate attention to the cause. Persuasive and powerful illustrations depicted the transportation of hundreds of African men, women, and children, inhumanly shackled together in chains, and tight-packed on slave ships with barely room to move. Circulation of the illustrations in print media throughout Europe brought greater awareness and empathy for enslaved Africans. Between the late 1700s and early 1800s, European countries and the United States (1808) legally abolished the Atlantic slave trade, but not slavery in the Americas.

After the United States’ successful war of independence from Great Britain in 1784, many white Americans were divided by the race problem. How would the new republic integrate or segregate free blacks and emancipated slaves into American society? A new racial theory claimed that slaves and free blacks were members of an innately degraded race, incapable of equality and the privileges of citizenship. Furthermore, defenders of slavery, promoted the concept that the natural and divine condition of black people in the United States was slavery. An abundance of literature and art illustrations were created and circulated in print media to support the pro-slavery movement.

In popular culture, advertisers used dehumanizing illustrations of African Americans to promote theatrical performances of minstrel shows, in which white actors covered in blackface, ridiculed the humanity and culture of enslaved people and free blacks. Minstrel shows created new stereotype characters, including Jim Crow. To sell and promote consumer products from pancakes, toothpaste, and kitchen items, to children games and toys, advertisers used the same dehumanizing images. It constantly reminded white people and newly arrived immigrants from Europe that black people were unfit for freedom and equality in American society.

By the mid-1800s American abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, learned important lessons from the British movement. In addition to lectures and literature, they learned that graphic illustrations of the horrors of American slavery were useful to expose the evils of the institution. Illustrations held the power to create empathy for enslaved people and motive others to take political action to abolish American slavery.

Eventually, the Union victory in the Civil War, combined with the influences of slave resistance, free blacks, abolitionists, and the Radical Republicans in Congress, resulted in the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which ended slavery in 1865.

After slavery was abolished, African Americans exercised their new freedoms and civil rights. They created their own positive self-images in black print media to oppose the negative ones. Unfortunately, they discovered it was difficult to compete against the mainstream media’s vast circulation. Meanwhile, the emerging invention of photography, with its ability to capture a moment in time, would become important to advancing civil rights in future decades.

That circulation of negative racial images increased with the invention of motion pictures (film and movies). One of the earliest films recognized for its cinematic innovations was Birth of a Nation in 1915. The Ku Klux Klan were the heroes of the movie, which popularized the belief that Reconstruction, following the Civil War, was a failed attempt to advance equality for African Americans.

By the 1930s, the last military veterans of the Civil War were dying and organizations raised money to erect heroic public sculptures and monuments in honor of their Confederate ancestors. Despite the defeat of the Confederacy, many white Americans in the North and South supported federal and state laws that denied civil and human rights for black Americans. Daily life was dangerous for any black person who was accused of violating Jim Crow laws or it’s unwritten social etiquette. To black Americans, the imposing image of Confederate monuments served as another public reminder to “stay in their place.”

From the 1900s to the 1960s various African American civil rights organizations used black-owned newspapers and other print media to fight for equality and justice. The genius of the nonviolent protest movement was how it used the images of television and print media to circulate the movement for human rights to a larger audience. Dramatic images of protestors required African Americans and liberal white supporters, to come face to face with the physical violence of white resistance. Protestors faced humiliation, beatings, arrest, jail, or death from law enforcement and white citizens. When law enforcement and white citizens resisted the nonviolent protesters’ demands for civil rights, the cameras of the news media and photojournalists captured the violence and broadcasted to national television; the photos were circulated in print media throughout the nation and the world.

Motion pictures were brought into the home by the invention of the television. Ironically, African Americans would use the technology of television and photography to their advantage during the civil rights movement. Today the powerful images of the Civil Rights Movement are a reminder that a picture is worth a thousand words. While legislation provided legal rights and protections for African Americans, the dehumanizing racial images moved underground, only to be revived by the recent technology, the Internet.

Artist illustrations and photography can be like a double-edged sword. Since the 1400s, dehumanizing racial illustrations and images were created by Europeans and white Americans to justify the enslavement and oppression of Africans and African Americans. Yet, counter illustrations and photographic images had the power to break down the walls of the slave trade, slavery, and segregation, by using the same technologies. A picture is worth a thousand words.

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Harvey Bakari is the illustrator for In A Different Tongue and owner of Bakari PH360 Historical Consulting LLC.