Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death

161 Pages·2015·1.843 MB·English

by  Courtney R. Baker

HUMANE
INSIGHT
Looking at Images of
African American Suffering and Death
COURTNEY R. BAKER
Humane Insight
The New Black STudieS SerieS
Edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight A. McBride
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.
Humane Insight
Looking at Images of African American
Suffering and Death
courTNey r. Baker
UnIverSIty of ILLInoIS PreSS
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously published
as “Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition,”
Journal of American Culture 29, no. 2 (2006): 111–24.
Reprinted by permission from Blackwell Publishing.
© 2015 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid- free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Baker, Courtney.
Humane insight : looking at images of African American
suffering and death / Courtney R. Baker.
pages cm. — (The new Black studies series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03948-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-09759-1 (e-book)
1. African Americans—Violence against—History—Pictorial
works. 2. African Americans—Social conditions—Pictorial
works. 3. Documentary photography—Social aspects—United
States—History. 4. Photojournalism—Social aspects—United
States—History. 5. Empathy—Social aspects—United States—
History. 6. Racism—United States—History—20th century.
I. Title.
e185.61.b148 2015
305.896'0730222—dc23 2015003808
In Memory of
Thomas Cary Saunders
1919–2008
and
Dorothy Belle Ottley Saunders
1921–2013

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Slavery’s Suffering Brought to Light—New Orleans, 1834 18
2. Framed and Shamed: Looking at the Lynched Body 35
3. Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition 69
4. Civil Rights and Battered Bodies 94
5. A Litany for New Orleans, 2005 109
Notes 119
Index 137

Acknowledgments
In September 2001, I watched via television as a space that I had
traversed and a place that I recognized became permanently disfigured. Since
then, I have sought to understand what compelled me to watch those extraor-
dinary images of people dying and, more, to appreciate what I learned from
watching other human beings in despair and death. In terms of its sheer
horror, 9/11 represented a scenario that has been repeated throughout time
and throughout the world and one that will sadly but I fear inevitably be
repeated in the future. No discussion of global capitalism, non-s tatist mili-
tary syndicates, or mobilized rhetoric has enabled me to understand fully the
extraordinary images of people of myriad races, ethnicities, and nationali-
ties dying. I still struggle to understand the magnitude of 9/11 and of other
events wherein humanity has been laid to waste. In the wake of that day, it
was the image and the word—a specific image and particular words, actu-
ally—through which I came to recognize the struggle for comprehension to
be itself a worthy object of study.
A few months after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I revisited
the first words of Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City”: “Seeing
Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center.”1 As it happened,
I had seen the city from the point of view that Certeau described, but I now
knew, as the text certainly did not or could not, that this point of view could
never now be replicated. The tense of the verb seeing now signaled to me a
remarkable lack of hubris. Did the destruction of the location invalidate the
knowledge Certeau was imparting? To speak metaphorically, did the sermon
die when the mount crumbled?