In Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship, historian Brenna W. Greer asks us to reconsider the relationship between Black capitalism and civil rights through public relations expert Moss H. Kendrix, photojournalist Gordon Parks, and publisher John H. Johnson. She uses magazines, newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and trade publications to underscore the need for an expanded conversation that includes efforts that do not fit our usual conceptions of Black activism. Moreover, she provides critical analysis on how each of these imagemakers used his professional platform to reframe the visual representations of Blacks while countering stereotypes with realistic renderings grounded in American citizenship. “Through their cultural production and their capitalism,” explains Greer, “these imagemakers performed work prerequisite to African Americans’ securing civil rights. That these representations of black citizenship were generated through black entrepreneurialism with the objective of financial profit does not negate the political and cultural work they performed” (p. 6).
Represented is structured so that each of the five chapters highlights one imagemaker between the 1930s and the 1950s. In this way, the author outlines their personal and professional backgrounds while offering multilayered historical context at every turn. More importantly, these Black professionals helped shift, shape, and define the advertisement terrain to include the complex Black consumer market. Kendrix, the least known of the three imagemakers but the book's central figure, gained entry into public relations during the Great Depression, after graduating from Morehouse College. During the New Deal programs of the 1930s, he took a job with the National Youth Administration (NYA) in Georgia at the same time the federal government embraced public relations practices. After World War II, Kendrix led the publicity campaign for the Liberian Centennial Commission, which celebrated the African country's one hundred years of independence amid Cold War developments. Kendrix had “to present Liberia as a historically Western and forward-looking state committed to democracy and open for business” (p. 112). He gained valuable publicity and marketing skills, which he simultaneously used to build an important network of professional contacts that served him well afterwards. Kendrix started the Moss Hyles Kendrix Organization in 1948 and within a few years had obtained a coveted consulting deal with Coca-Cola. He convinced the Atlanta company to fund advertisement campaigns that not only targeted Black consumers but did so through Black spokespersons. Kendrix “single-handedly engineered Coca-Cola's turn toward black consumers and its imaging of African Americans as consumer” (p. 199).
Parks gained his inspiration from the Farm Security Administration's (FSA) documentary photographs, which depicted the dispersal of rural America during the height of the Great Depression. The images produced by the FSA helped the federal government solicit widespread support for the Roosevelt administration's New Deal initiatives. While Parks worked as a railway attendant, the FSA images left an indelible impression on the midwesterner from Kansas—so much so that he took up photography and embarked on a career as an artist. This new vocation took him to Chicago, where he made a name for himself. His photography, which included a portrait studio business, graced the pages of national publications such as the Chicago Defender and garnered widespread attention. In other ways, Parks's early photographs and exhibits captured the despair of Black urban life on Chicago's South Side. His talent, alongside his growing network, provided him with new opportunities to hone his craft. In particular, the FSA and then the Office of War Information (OWI) hired him to capture images that highlighted the Black experience during World War II. By this time, Park's photographic sensibilities had been inspired by the photo-essay work of author Richard Wright. In this position, Parks produced his most well-known photograph, American Gothic, which became an iconic photograph taken during the war. Greer explains that while the photograph was oppositional, it contrasted with the propaganda photographs Parks took during his time with the OWI. The OWI never published this image, deeming it too contradictory to the message they had in mind. It did not fit within the OWI's propaganda initiative to portray African Americans in their full citizenship, even if it was not their reality. “The ready acceptance of Parks and his photography as oppositional,” writes Greer, “has resulted in a failure to adequately incorporate or account for the propaganda he produced on behalf of the government while employed by the FSA and then the OWI during World War II” (p. 88). After his wartime work, too, Parks became a corporate photographer; he and his family joined the middle class, thereby fulfilling the American dream.
Johnson started the Johnson Publishing Company to reconfigure perceptions of African Americans in print media while catering to them as consumers. He built up circulation for his several publications, including Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet. The flagship publication, Ebony, quickly reached over 100,000 Black readers. In this way, he embraced the proven business model of white publications such as Reader's Digest and Life, rather than implementing an untested method. His innovation was in how he applied that same formula to the Black consumer market. In particular, he followed Life's photo magazine format to highlight Black life, and Ebony had to be all things to all Black people. Johnson believed Ebony's success would help win over revenue-generating advertisement dollars from white corporations, but he miscalculated, at least initially.
Greer's ability to effectively describe photographs and advertisements in gripping detail is an important strength throughout Represented. She places her analysis and commentary alongside the actual visuals that are so important to her central argument. In particular, she interrogates the images of Black women in the pages of Ebony, on which Johnson depended to grow his enterprise. His marketing strategy to Black consumers consisted of walking the line between “cheesecake images”—photographs of mostly light-skinned Black women—that pushed the boundaries off appropriateness for a magazine trying to change stereotypes and images that depicted Black women as hypersexual. In the weekly magazine Jet, Johnson published the photographs of fourteen-year-year-old Emmett Till's mangled body after Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, chose to have an open-casket funeral for “all the world” to see what had been done to her son. Johnson's seemingly moral decision to highlight the injustices Black southerners faced at the hands of white violence, Greer explains, should be understood for its documentary value as well as its monetary value, as such content netted the publication profits at the same time.
While Greer references an earlier generation of pioneering Black public relations professionals, in many ways she sets Kendrix, Parks, and Johnson apart from a well-developed field of African American endeavor that included Black professional women. Instead, she argues that the three figures were influenced as much by the mainstream strategies of the federal government and white print media as they were from black marketers. The Black professional imagemakers did not stray too far from the patriarchal ideals of Americanness, as defined through such themes as gender, democracy, identity, patriotism, and citizenship. Represented deepens our understanding of the influences of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Black freedom movement on the Black-marketing landscape while also making an important contribution to the growing scholarship on Black business, consumerism, and civil rights.
