The Scottsboro Case and Photographic Racial Representation in 1930s American Media

This book offers the first sustained examination of the extensive use of photographs in the coverage of the Scottsboro case during the decade when visual news came of age.

This case study offers the opportunity to explore broader questions of ongoing relevance about the ways photographs serve media narratives of race, gender, and class. The Scottsboro case witnessed the unprecedented proliferation of pictures of African Americans across American and indeed global media at a time when images of Black citizens rarely appeared in mainstream media. These photographs show how media forms constructed and sometimes challenged racial identities through photography for millions of citizens. The encoding of an individual photograph might vary whether printed in a Southern newspaper, on a Communist pamphlet, or in the African American press. The author develops a complex analysis of the multiple uses of photography by examining themes and case studies such as: the arrest photograph of the Nine in relation to the representation of lynching and mob violence; the media spectacle of the trials and ‘hippodroming’ (sensationalist courtroom photography); how Communist media and weaponized photomontage; the Black press and the Jim Crow legal system; the gendering of the coverage with respect to women accusers and defendants’ mothers; the globalism of the case in relation to anti-imperialist movements; and mugshots and prison photographs of the Nine as carceral images. These discrete themes enable fresh insights into the production of racial values during this transformative decade in the histories of photography and mass media, and their interrelation in modern propaganda.

This is a fascinating and important text for scholars and students in the history of photography, history of media, and political and social history.