A "picture panorama, with text, of all axpects of American Negro life from African origins through slavey days to the present [integration efforts]. The pictures were collected ... from prints, engravings, woodcuts, photographs, paintings."

A "picture panorama, with text, of all axpects of American Negro life from African origins through slavey days to the present [integration efforts]. The pictures were collected ... from prints, engravings, woodcuts, photographs, paintings."

Black Magic Langston Hughes's last book, presents the vast, sweeping story of African-American entertainers--the artists and the musicians, the singers and the dancers, the obscure and the illustrious--from the tragic beginnings in slavery to he triumphant artistic achievements of the late 1960s. Long considered the most comprehensive history of African-Americans in the performing arts, this milestone in black history features hundreds of rare and beautiful illustrations. Covering both the obstacles to achievement that these artists faced, and their eventual triumph, Black Magic—long out-of-print—is an essential book of American history.

Childhood joy, pleasure, and creativity are not often associated with the civil rights movement. Their ties to the movement may have faded from historical memory, but these qualities received considerable photographic attention in that tumultuous era. Katharine Capshaw’s Civil Rights Childhood reveals how the black child has been—and continues to be—a social agent that demands change. Because children carry a compelling aura of human value and potential, images of African American children in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education had a powerful effect on the fight for civil rights. In the iconography of Emmett Till and the girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham church bombings, Capshaw explores the function of children’s photographic books and the image of the black child in social justice campaigns for school integration and the civil rights movement. Drawing on works ranging from documentary photography, coffee-table and art books, and popular historical narratives and photographic picture books for the very young, Civil Rights Childhood sheds new light on images of the child and family that portrayed liberatory models of blackness, but it also considers the role photographs played in the desire for consensus and closure with the rise of multiculturalism. Offering rich analysis, Capshaw recovers many obscure texts and photographs while at the same time placing major names like Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison in dialogue with lesser-known writers. An important addition to thinking about representation and politics, Civil Rights Childhood ultimately shows how the photobook—and the aspirations of childhood itself—encourage cultural transformation.