Slide Show

Photos That Challenge Stereotypes About African-American Youths

Credit Pete Souza/The White House

Slide Show

Photos That Challenge Stereotypes About African-American Youths

Credit Pete Souza/The White House

Photos That Challenge Stereotypes About African-American Youths

The photographs in the new book “Picturing Children” affirm that kids will be kids: They study. They play. They interact with family. But those lives are often overshadowed by prejudice and preconceptions.

In “Double Exposure,” a series of small books published by the Smithsonian’s soon-to-open National Museum of African American History and Culture, the complexities and nuances of African-American life suffuse images made from the medium’s birth right through today. “Picturing Children,” the fourth volume published in association with D. Giles Limited, features some 50 images from the museum’s growing collection of more than 20,000 photographs.

These pictures resonate with the joy, contentment, resistance, determination, dissent and the routines of everyday life: a photograph by Jason Miccolo Johnson of boys and girls singing in the choir of Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington (Slide 3); a pensive photograph by George Krause of a child sitting alone in a church pew (below); and James Karales’s image of a young demonstrator, waving an American flag at the Alabama march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 (Slide 4).

Photo
Pews. 1958.Credit George Krause

Through images and words by photographers and writers, black and white, “Picturing Children” challenges the stereotype of the broken black family and examines the family’s crucial role “in shaping who we are.” Images of the famous or the disenfranchised — Nina Leen’s photograph of the pioneering baseball player Jackie Robinson with his wife and son (below), or James E. Larkin’s Civil War-era picture of enslaved women and their children near Alexandria, Va. — document situations that are simultaneously personal and universal, affirming the “importance of an engaged and committed family.”

Photo
The baseball player Jackie Robinson, his wife, Rachel, and their son, Jackie Jr., posed on the steps of their Brooklyn home. July 1949.Credit Nina Leen/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images

Among the book’s five chapters, one examines how the African-American community, from schools and churches to sports and fraternal organizations, supported “the development of children physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially.” The chapter on play expands the theme, featuring children having fun, an important aspect of early development that spurs mutual understanding and self-confidence.

Starting in the 19th century, black-owned photo studios allowed African-Americans to represent themselves as they wanted to be seen, and the book’s section on portraiture reflects that revered status.

The studio was especially important for children, who endured withering attacks on their self-worth by stereotypical depictions. A study in the 1940s by an African-American psychologist, Dr. Kenneth Clark, demonstrated the fragility of black children’s self-image when he showed black grade schoolers photographs of black and white dolls, identical in every way except for skin color. A majority of them chose the white doll as the one they would “like to play with,” considering the white doll “nice” and the black doll “bad.” No wonder portraits, and the very act of being photographed, played an important role in bolstering the self-confidence of black children in a culture awash with grotesque caricatures.

The book’s final chapter looks at how African-American children empowered themselves through political activism. Pictures include Gertrude Samuels’s photograph of a meeting of teenage members of the Little Rock Nine, who tried to integrate Central High School in the Arkansas city in 1957 against ferocious opposition from white supremacists, and Devin Allen’s contemporary image of a young girl holding a Black Lives Matter sign at a Baltimore rally in 2015 (Slide 5).

Children have long played an important role in the struggle for civil rights. The 1963 images from the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., vividly demonstrated to a national audience the depravity and cruelty of the police and opponents of civil rights who attacked youths engaged in nonviolent protest. Stark photographs of them being attacked by dogs and knocked to the ground by water cannon shifted public opinion in their favor, persuading long-skeptical white Americans of the inherent indecency of segregation and its peril to democracy.

Photo
Children and members of the San Francisco chapter of the National Council of Negro Women at a voter registration motorcade. 1956.Credit Cox Studio, Frances Albrier Collection

“Picturing Children” also makes clear that African-American children have not been any less nurtured than those of other ethnic and racial groups. Indeed, the reality of racism and the potential for discrimination have made caring for and educating black children even more vital.

“African American adults have long done their very best to protect their children from a society that does not always value them highly and to remind them that, no matter what the outside world says, they have dignity and sacred worth that no outside force can touch,” wrote Marian Wright Edelman, the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, in one of the book’s essays.

She also offers a reminder that despite significant gains and the election of our nation’s first black president, considerable work remains: “A toxic cocktail — poverty, resegregation, unequal schools, massive illiteracy and innumeracy, racial disparity in every child-serving system, violence, and a pipeline to prison that feeds a mass incarceration system — is sentencing millions of children of color to dead-end, powerless, and hopeless lives.”

It is in this context that photography, as current events confirm, has become even more important for African-American communities, both as a means of documenting these problems and as a catalyst for hope and change.

“We know that children are the only real Progress, the sole Hope, the sure victory over Evil,” the seminal black intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1922. “Properly reared and trained and there is no Problem or Wrong that we cannot withstand.”


Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Follow @MauriceBerger , @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook and Instagram.

Pictures of the Week

View all Pictures of the Week