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Competing Image Vernaculars In The Anti-Lynching Movement Of The 1930'S, Samuel P. Perry

Communication Dissertations

Lynching photographs and images of spectacle lynching were originally produced to commemorate and celebrate lynching. Through processes of rhetorical re-circulation and repurposing of lynching photographs by those in the anti-lynching movement, lynching and visual representations of it became socially unacceptable. The rhetorical strategies concerning the display of images of violence toward African Americans developed in the anti-lynching movement became one of the most important means of protesting civil rights violations in the United States. This study examines three cases of repurposing lynching photographs during the peak of the anti-lynching movement in the 1930’s. The first is the NAACP sponsored Art …