THE EVOLUTION OF THE BLACK IMAGE IN WHITE CONSCIOUSNESS, 1876 - 1954: A POPULAR CULTURE PERSPECTIVE

This study is an organized discovery of how the dominant, mainstream white culture dealt with the presence of Afro-American people who were unassimilable and would not accept an assigned role within a society hostile to their presence. A look at the period between the failure of Reconstruction and the first significant, enforceable civil rights legislation is revealing. Was there a gap between mediated images of black Americans and real blacks, and if so, what purpose(s) did it serve? Two major procedures were used to reveal white American cultural behavior towards the black race: first more than 3,000 popular and material culture items were classified by genre, described, and presented in chronological order; second, all of the items are combined and analyzed in light of their historical setting. Chapters one through 12 present treatments of blacks in such genres as history books, children\u27s literature, music, art, toys and games, greeting cards, and kitsch. Chapters 13 through 16 note trans-generic images, conventions, and trends as well as compare black historical events with contemporary culture-images. What results is a uniform pattern of slowing (sometimes altogether stopping) any illusion of black progress. In some generic categories, blacks were virtually reenslaved throughout the time period of this study. In others, the mediated black was at least several generations behind his living, breathing counterpart, himself slowed by the image lag. Mediated blacks mocked and belittled themselves until World War II, when, with few exceptions, they virtually disappeared. Blacks\u27 increased social, political, and economic clout made mediated mockery too controversial, so they were ignored altogether to avoid upsetting whites. Again the economic imperative of the commercial culture triumphed over any moral imperative. Brown vs. the Board of Education gave blacks some legal escape from these separate, but hardly equal, years. Popular and material culture images today are by no means free of distortion and oversimplification and may never be until more tools of presentation are out of exclusively white hands. The discovery of the gap between the mediated and actual black American has subsequently contributed to its closing a significant amount, however