This compelling reassessment of the NAACP focusses on the cultural dimensions of the association's campaign for equality, “a battle fought not just in the legislature and the courtroom but also in the movie theater and art gallery, on the stage and television screen” (203). While aspects of the NAACP's cultural campaign – including protest against The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Walter White's lobbying of Hollywood producers in the 1940s and 1950s – have received substantial critical attention, Jenny Woodley's Art for Equality is the first comprehensive study of the NAACP's cultural work from its foundation in 1910 to the 1960s. It generates new insights by exploring diverse campaigns in light of an enduring commitment to socially responsible art that could challenge racist attitudes, paving the way for equality.

This beautifully conducted study, which draws upon extensive archival research, is alert to the tensions that animated the NAACP's cultural work. Woodley offers astute commentary on the association's ambivalent attitude towards popular culture: if national leaders such as White and W. E. B. Du Bois recognized the growing influence of film and television as a cultural arena in which “race prejudice had grown like a weed” (129), their hierarchical attitudes towards culture blinded them to possibilities for cultural activism in new formats. Not only was the association's antilynching campaign conducted in the theatre and the gallery, a strategy that overlooked the potential of popular forms such as Billie Holliday's “Strange Fruit” to reach broader audiences, but White's campaign in Hollywood was hobbled by his failure to engage with black actors. Another important dimension of the study is Woodley's historical contextualization of the NAACP's cultural campaigns. She notes that the association was not alone in placing faith in the transformative potential of culture. Given the emphasis upon cultural activism in the New Deal and by many on the left, it is worth asking why a commitment to what James Weldon Johnson called “the art approach to the Negro problem” (1) has provoked such impassioned criticism, not least in pioneering scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance in the 1970s.

Some sections of the monograph, such as a chapter devoted to the Harlem Renaissance, cover well-trodden critical ground, but Woodley's patient exposition of debates within the NAACP about the relationship between art and political activity supplies useful correctives. Given an abiding critical tendency to quote Du Bois's famous line “all Art is propaganda” out of context, Woodley's exemplary account of his evolving ideas on culture as an arena for confrontation in the 1920s is well handled. Equally significant is the author's examination of strategies employed to limit the influence of white patronage. In addition to commentary on how The Crisis’s literary prizes were conceived as “an alternative to white patronage and therefore white control” (70) (even if some of the judges and sponsors were white), discussion of the personal correspondence files of White and Johnson demonstrates that they “used their positions within the NAACP and the power and influence they gave them to assist black artistic talent” (52). Such analysis offers a counterpoint to critical accounts that cast Du Bois as an exceptional figure, an artistic gatekeeper who sought to guide black cultural production away from the pitfalls of black bohemianism. As Woodley points out, this interpretation does not square with the diversity of material published in The Crisis since “[n]o easy generalizations can be made about the ‘type’ of African American the NAACP celebrated” (95).

Taken as a whole, this rewarding study, which focusses on a range of media from the 1935 exhibition An Art Commentary on Lynching to attempts to ban the television show Amos ’n’ Andy in the 1950s, pursues a narrative approach that facilitates comparative analysis of convergences and divergences in the association's cultural strategies. Given Woodley's sustained interest in the NAACP's commitment to eradicating racism “through exposure, education, and persuasion” (3), it is surprising that there is no mention of Du Bois's pioneering efforts to foster black children's literature (both in The Crisis and in the short-lived children's magazine Brownies’ Book, which was edited by Jessie Fauset). Likewise, a fascinating discussion of shifting female iconography in The Crisis in the 1920s, which saw the demure New Negro woman give way to “images of exotic African temptresses” (85), would have been strengthened by engagement with recent scholarship on the black diasporic dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance, including Clare Corbould's Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939 (2009). Notwithstanding these quibbles, this substantial monograph wears its learning lightly, breaking new ground in its exploration of how the association approached “questions of assimilation, cultural pluralism, class bias, cultural elitism, censorship, and propaganda” (6).