Research

Excerpts from Maurice Bergers, ‘For all the world to see’ Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights

“epic battle against invisibility”

… this struggle for morale and legitimacy – for the hearts and minds of Americans of all colors – was fundamentally an epic battle against invisibility.

In its opening sequence, the documentary (CBS news, the weapons of Gordon park) makes clear one of its central themes: that racism could easily have destroyed (Gordon) Parks had it not been for his Artistic talent.

There is no question that visual images have influenced how Americans see and think about race. That is true because much of what defines race in society was, and is, innately visual. Ideas and observations about race are, more often than not, communicated through visual cues, symbols, and stereotypes. To talk about race is to talk about skin color: black yellow white and brown. To talk about race is to talk about the shape of the eyes or nose or the texture of the hair, about the clothes or hairstyle or body types.

… only crime is the color of their skin

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe, nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they only see my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed everything and anything except me. – Ralph Eliasson’s The Invisible Man

“The very term ‘invisible’,” Frederick Karl writes of the novel’s abiding theme, “suggests that not even what is seeable is indeed visible; that the invisible remains the stronger element; the more powerful and insistent presence.”