Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Words: An Analysis of Visual Framing in Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Protest Photograph

Since 2011, police-involved deaths of unarmed African Americans have gained national attention, and media images of protest events associated with these deaths have generated mixed reactions among media consumers. News images, when accompanied by text, are an important tool in the reporting of significant events and are an essential element in framing how media consumers interpret those events (Corrigall-Brown, 2012). However, media images can contribute to subtle, unconscious, and often nonverbal racist ideas based on visual representations of people of color (Perez Huber & Solorzano, 2015), and there appears to be a dichotomy between how protest images of African Americans are published in mainstream media compared to how this demographic self-represent in Black press newspapers and on social media.;Visual framing and critical race theory served as the theoretical foundations of this research because according to Entman (1993), visual framing is the use of visual images by media to promote the definition of a problem and present a causal interpretation of that problem. This research analyzed images of African American involved protest events during the Civil Rights Era and the Black Lives Matter Era. The goal was to identify visual framing themes in images published in mainstream and Black press newspapers and social media, differences in the visual framing of protest images of African Americans between mainstream and Black newspapers, and how Black Lives Matter social media images may be visually framed compared to those published in mainstream and Black newspapers. Using thematic analysis, this research analyzed 211 published images to examine image content and how these images contributed to framing the visual narratives of protest events. Consequently, this research found that race continues to play a significant role in how Black protesters are visually framed in mainstream newspapers, but differences also exist in how Black press newspapers and Black Lives Matter visually present protest events.