| In 1955, black marketing guru Moss Kendrix helped Coca-Cola produce marketing materials that featured fashionably dressed, Coke-drinking African Americans engaged in middle-class activities, such as golfing or getting ready for prom. Redefining African Americans according to postwar definitions of good citizenship, these images were important tools of and events in blacks' civil rights struggle. Market-based imagemakers directly participated in and influenced civil rights efforts, yet historians largely have ignored them. Using historical and cultural studies methods to analyze pop culture texts, government propaganda, personal papers, and organizational records, and relying on oral interviews with key participants, this dissertation examines how African Americans seized new opportunities in photojournalism, public relations and advertising to create innovative media representations of black people and black life. With the war, the NAACP emerged as a major black public relations apparatus promoting politically expedient images of black patriotism. After the war, blacks' media representation became foundational to black enterprise, spurring growth in black publishing, public relations, and modeling. Leveraging black dollars, entrepreneurs including Kendrix and EBONY publisher John Johnson compelled national advertisers to recognize and represent African Americans as good consumers. These middle-class ideals informed civil rights activists who, in the mid-fifties, facilitated media representations of dignified, non-violent black protest that infiltrated the white media and signaled the "birth" of the "civil rights movement." Examining the relationship between African Americans' image-making and civil rights work, this history places blacks within histories from which they are largely excluded, including the expansion of public relations and documentary photography, and the development of modern commercial marketing. It also breaks down false boundaries in the civil rights historiography isolating the movement from the dynamics of capitalism and enterprise, and demonstrates that, along with grassroots protest tactics, blacks pursued their freedom by participating in mainstream, white, and even racist political and corporate agendas. It prompts, then, reconsideration of what constituted civil rights work, and it helps illuminate why the civil rights movement took the form it did, both on the ground and in historical memory. |
