Advertising Civil Rights

Kathy's article on the power of the black consumer in 1950's radio brought me back to some thoughts I had on an article by Leigh Raiford about SNCC posters during the civil rights movement. In “'Come Let Us Build a New World Together'”: SNCC and Photography of the
Civil Rights Movement," Raiford argues for the importance of photography as a visual tool for community organization and empowerment in the 1960's. I can't revisit her whole argument here, but one of the key points I took away from it was that in terms of the mass distribution of the images and text that defined these moments, organizations like the SNCC picked up where mass media left off. She notes: Reporter Paul Good opened ABC television’s first news bureau in the South, in Atlanta, in the fall of 1963 and recounts that national news reporters were dispatched from location to location to produce reports of major “events,” especially those involving violent confrontations, as they happened, or shortly thereafter. Good notes that, by
1963, he had “received the impression that they [editors and producers] were weary of civil rights stories . . . and they did not want or need any analyses of current white-black attitudes or projections of how these attitudes could affect the course of the civil rights story in the days ahead.” The SNCC saw their opening, and produced posters like the one above.

For Raiford, the poster emphasizes (much like black radio) "the 'beloved community,' a circle of redeeming kinship in and through which individuals aimed for their greatest personal and collective potential. Doing so forces each member of this trinity to recognize themselves and each other as free from fear, internal doubt, and external degradation" (1136). But I also found it significant that these posters were commodities of a kind, allowing those affiliated with the movement to purchase and assert their affiliation with the movement, using a very different kind of buying power to affirm identification with a wide, racially and geographically diverse group of activists. Speigel argues that this image, above all, targeted an audience of financial supporters: "That SNCC chose this photographic poster as representative and appealing suggests that it was the image of themselves the young activists most wanted to promote. That the poster sold out suggests that, at least in 1963, this was the image of SNCC that audiences found most
compelling" (1137).

This argument sends me in a number of different directions, but in the context of the formation of the black radio market that precedes it, it suggest to me that there is another level to the idea of harnessing the powers of advertising and consumerism. Perhaps dissent is as available in the harnessing of the formal and industrial features of mass advertising, as it is in exercising the power of the consumer.